So, I Married a Programmer

Hello, I’m the wife of a programer. I have strong opinions on technologies I know nothing about.

“HTML5 is where it's at!”

“Boo flash.” [Makes thumbs down motion]

C sharp is no longer a note on the piano for me.

When I ask my husband how work is, my eyes quickly glaze over as the terminology becomes more and more specialized and complex.

Yes, that is me.

I’m a fine arts person. I studied theatre and history in college. I write. I read poetry. Math and (to a lesser degree) science are the bane of my existence.

But, in the past two weeks I have started learning how to code. My husband has been trying to get me to do this for years. But, every time he brought it up, my brain would shut down. I had a severe mental block against it.

It’s the same mental block that makes my eyes glaze over anytime anyone starts talking about math or numbers. I had decided long ago that these things were out of my range of comprehension and the decision stuck.

But, somehow recently something broke. I realized one day as my husband was sharing about his work, that I could actually follow him. I knew what he was talking about and I wasn’t lost.

The next time he suggested that I learn a little html or css I didn’t balk at the suggestion. In fact he suggested it at a moment when we were discussing a number of apps I want to build and I was feeling frustrated that Bryan doesn’t have the time to devote to them.

It was in that moment that I realized I could do it. I could actually get over this wall, this block, and use these things that confounded me for so long to build something that I want.

So, I signed up for Codecadamy and I started taking baby steps. And you know what, I was surprised at how easy it could actually be.

My husband keeps joking that his secrets out. That what he does is actually super simple, and now I won’t think he’s so brilliant. We both know it’s a lie. He is brilliant and the coding he does at his level is incredibly challenging. But, I’m realizing that I don’t need to understand advanced mathematics, or complex languages. I don’t need to understand Ruby and C++. I don’t even need to understand advanced html or CSS or Javascript yet.

All I have to do is understand one step, one lesson, one problem, and keep building on that.

And isn’t that true of any large challenge in our lives? Any new skill we are trying to learn or understand? We don’t have to learn it all at once. It’s ok if our eyes still glaze over a little. All we have to do is take one step towards understanding the basics.

We have to walk before we can dance.

But it’s in learning to walk that we start to believe that dancing is possible.

Rejoicing in the journey, Bethany