Demystifying the modern digital industry "wizard"

Hi, my name is Andy and I am a technologist. I’ve been monkeying about on the web since the mid 90s in one form or another, and I seem to have somehow turned some initial tinkering with very early HTML ¹ whilst avoiding my University coursework into a subsequent career in the London digital industry.

Being a technologist, I am regularly made aware of how little of my work is understood by people outside of my specialism — I’ve lost count of the number of times I have seen various bits of fairly unremarkable consumer-facing digital media / technology described as “magical” or have had clients (generally wrongly) assume that certain bits of functionality “just magically work”.

I suppose it’s related to a few key trends:

1. As consumer products and consumer technology gets ever more complex and ever more compact, we start to treat it as an unfathomable black box, despite the fact that humans have invented most of it during the last 28 years when it comes to anything online.

2. As things get easier to use and harder to fix ourselves, we tend to pay less attention to how they actually work.

3. The more money we have (or the cheaper technology gets), the more we expect it to “just work”.

4. As we get more accustomed to things “just working”, the more we take that for granted.

5. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic ²

All of this leads into a culture of what could perahps (and uncharitably) be called “wilfull ignorance”, where clients (and consumers) have neither the will nor the desire to understand how these technologies and products that they come to rely on more and more every day actually work.

Now don’t get me wrong — I’m not suggesting that everyone needs to become a web developer or an electronics engineer (hell, I’m certainly not the latter once you take it past a bit of light Arduino tinkering), but I do believe that there is a value in trying to understand how things work even if you’re not going to use that curiosity to take them apart at the weekend.

Disclosure time: what I do for a living is not magic.

It’s actually pretty mundane when you come to unpick it, was all learned (in my case at least) through self-directed study / trial and error rather than any kind of structured study, and was mercifully devoid of career guidance from battered talking hats or an academic curriculum punctuated by near death experiences at the hands of a nefarious, noseless nemesis ³.

In truth, most web programming is “simply” a case of figuring out what data you have / need to have, writing a bunch of “if this then do that” rules for manipulating data and defining user interactions, assembling some fairly straightforward building blocks in the form of HTML to make a page structure out of, adding some (increasingly complicated but not necessarily complex) Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) to make it look pretty, and layering on some JavaScript (JS) to make it “do other stuff” in the web browser without always having to reload the page.

It’s not wildly different if you’re developing mobile apps — slightly different building blocks, same basic ideas (data, interface, and interaction).

For some reason, however, we don’t regard this digtial building and decorating in the same way that we view the more munane task of munging baked clay bricks together with a mixture of sand and cement, daubing it with gypsum plaster, and then slapping on a few coats of Dulux.

Really though, how is that any less magical than making a website? Do you know how to make bricks? Grind pigments and mix paint? Construct a power station or electrical distribution grid? Probably not, but you don’t regard Bob the builder, Dave the decorator, or Eric the electrician ⁴ as some kind of building site Gandalf / Dumbledore / Jonathan Strange ⁵ for being able to take those materials and turn them into a nice new kitchen or conservatory, do you?

The reality is that what I do these days is more akin to architecture, if we are to continue with the building industry metaphors. I work with clients to understand their needs and wants, establish their budget, translate those requirements into a detailed scheme of work that can be achieved within their budget, and then (with my main contractor hat on) I bring together the appropriate professionals to do the building work. As such I don’t need to be able to do every job that needs to be done to complete the project, but I do need to be able to make sense of what are often unclear and sometimes conflicting requirements, understand the available technologies, techniques, and skills needed and then bring them all together and deliver a successful product.

Maybe that’s where the magic is after all…

Originally posted on Medium

Footnotes

1. I started writing HTML before Internet Explorer was even a thing, and I can still just about remember how cool the first version of Mosaic was… and now I feel really old! ↩

2. Obligatory Arthur C Clarke quote in a tech article dealing with “magic”? Check! ↩

3. I do feel like kind of a failure for never having acquired sufficient success or notoriety to warrant a nemesis, but at least I can slip some gratuitous alliteration in ↩

4. Yes, I know they’re all male names, and that’s reflective of an outdated patriarchal society where manual trades such as those noted above are still dominated by men, but they still wouldn’t be magical if it were Hermione the hod carrier, Parvati the plumber, or Ginny the gas fitter doing the work. ↩

5. Yes, I did mean Jonathan and not Stephen, because I like books and wanted to score literary bonus points by avoiding the more obvious Dr Strange namecheck. ↩