The man who wouldn't call himself a programmer

By Dave Fuller, Managing and Technical Director, Accent

I spent a good part of my childhood in the corner of rooms I had no business being in. Village halls, back rooms, someone's front room with too many chairs crammed into it. I would sit with a sketchbook on my knees drawing monsters and ninjas while, on the other side of the room, a group of men argued about something I could not follow. Memory, probably. Pointers. Whether a thing should be done this way or that way. I understood none of it and I listened to all of it.

My dad was one of those men. He had brought me along, as he usually did.

Before any of that he was a bricklayer. In his late twenties, ankylosing spondylitis ended his career on the tools. He had a wife, a young son, and no obvious route back to the only work he knew.

So he bought a Commodore 64.

Brickbat

What he did with it was not a career plan. He wrote games. Brickbat, a Frogger of sorts, the kind of thing you could get running on a C64 if you were stubborn enough. He wrote them so that my mum and I had something to play. That was the brief and that was the whole of the brief.

There was no industry to break into, no portfolio to build, nobody to impress. He had a problem, which was that his family had nothing to do on a Tuesday evening, and he had a machine, and he worked out how to get from one to the other. I think that is where the habit started. Not with a love of computers exactly, more with the discovery that a great many problems will yield if you sit with them for long enough.

From there it got serious in the way hobbies sometimes do. He moved on to early PCs, the 286 era, and started teaching C and C++ at adult education. He was good at it. He made friends there, proper friends, the sort he kept for decades, all of them equally deep in it. Those were the rooms I sat in the corner of.

Later he ran a business writing software for the insurance industry. Some of it is still running today, quietly doing its job for people who have no idea who wrote it.

In all that time, he never once called himself a programmer. He still doesn't.

What I picked up without noticing

I did not learn to program in those rooms. I learnt something more useful, and I did not know I was learning it.

I learnt that software is a tool. It gets made because somebody needs something, and it is finished when they have it. My wife has a phrase for this, borrowed from somewhere: did it make the ship go faster? My dad's software made the ship go faster. That was the only test it ever had to pass.

I learnt that clever is not the same as useful, and that the two are occasionally in opposition.

And I learnt that the people who build this stuff are ordinary. They are enthusiastic and argumentative and frequently wrong, and they are mostly working it out as they go. Nobody in those rooms had been anointed. They were just interested, and they had kept being interested for long enough that it added up to something.

I mention this because the industry does not present itself that way from the outside. From the outside it looks like a closed shop with an entrance exam. I had the enormous good fortune of seeing the inside of it from the corner of a room, before I was old enough to be intimidated by it, and it looked like a hobby.

The long way round

I was a kid who drew. That was the thing I was, and it did not seem to have anything to do with the room I was sitting in.

I went to art school and studied sculpture, which is not a qualification for the software industry by any reading of it. I joined Accent as a creative. That was the job, that was what I was hired to do, and if you had told me then that I would spend years of my life writing code I would have laughed at you.

What happened was slow and unremarkable. Clients had problems. Some of those problems needed something building, and the something did not exist, and there was nobody else to build it. So I learnt what I needed to learn to get that particular thing done, and then the next thing, and then the thing after that. There was no moment of transformation. There was a long accumulation of small necessities.

I look back now and I can see that at some point along the way I crossed over. On any reasonable definition, I could be called a programmer.

And I find I don't want the word, any more than my dad wanted it. Not out of false modesty and not because I think I'm short of the mark. It just describes the tool rather than the work. Problem solver is closer, even if it sounds like something off a motivational poster. He came to it from a building site. I came to it from a sculpture studio. We arrived at the same place and neither of us wants the badge.

I think that is because the badge points at the wrong thing. Sculpture and bricklaying and software are all, in the end, the business of working out how to make something stand up.

Norwich

He is retired now. He still writes software, still every week, for no client and no deadline. He does it because it teaches him something. He is in his seventies and he is learning a new framework because he wondered how it worked.

When we go to Norwich he will still point out walls. That one, back in his bricklaying days. He is proud of it, not wistful about it. It is holding a building up and it has been holding it up for fifty years, which is more than most of us can say about anything we have made.

What we look for

I run a company now, made up of a collection of talented programming nerds and a designer who keeps us all in line. When we hire, I am not really looking at the qualifications. I am looking for three things, and I did not arrive at them through any management book. I arrived at them in the corner of those rooms.

Curious. Ambitious. Interested.

That is what those men had. It is what my dad still has, in his seventies, teaching himself something new for no reason other than wanting to know. It is what makes somebody worth working with, and it is not something a degree can tell you about a person.

If you are on the outside of this industry and wondering whether there is a way in for you, that is the entry requirement as far as I can tell. Not a computer science degree. Not the right background. Caring whether the thing works for the person who needs it, and being willing to sit with the problem for longer than is reasonable.

My dad's advice, given often and always in the same words: whatever you end up doing, be the best at it. Or the best you can be.

He was a bricklayer who wrote insurance software. I am a sculptor who runs a software company. Neither of us would call ourselves programmers.

The walls are still standing, though.

Dave Fuller is Managing and Technical Director of Accent Design Group Ltd, the Norwich digital agency that has designed, built, hosted and maintained websites and web-based applications for over 27 years. He holds qualifications in web accessibility and design.

How this article was written

The story here is my own and my father's, and every fact in it came from us rather than from research. I worked through the angles with Claude, an AI assistant, which helped me find the shape of the piece and produced a first draft from my notes and recollections. I then checked it line by line, corrected the details it had guessed at, removed the ones it had invented, and edited it into my own voice.

My father read and approved what is written here about him, including the naming of his condition. The buildings, the games and the software are all real.