Relating to the inner geek

Here’s the latest guest post at johnnylaird.net in response to my invitation for guest bloggers – which still stands if you’d like to step up to the plate.

Kevin Mulryne is a Husband, father to 3, E-learning Specialist and musician.

Although we’ve never actually met, I started a Twitter dialog with Kevin around about the time we both attended a TEDx event in London.

Here, Kevin write about…Relating to the inner geek

When I was at secondary school there were no computers in the classrooms. Some time during my year 7 or 8 a Research Machines (RM) 380Z and a Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) appeared in a small side room. Only the sixth form A-level maths and physics students were allowed to touch them. They seemed mysterious, magical and unattainable – and so were the computers.

1KB RAM

My first experience of a teacher using a computer in a lesson was in Physics. I was terrible at Physics but I enjoyed it. It was a bit like alchemy to me – a mystery but fascinating. The teacher taught us the patterns of constellations with a program he had written himself on a Sinclair ZX81 with 1KB memory. As he put it, “I don’t know what all the fuss is about the lack of memory on the ZX81 – I certainly haven’t used it all up yet.” I was blown away but I couldn’t get my hands on the technology and I certainly couldn’t be a geek because I wasn’t any good at maths or physics.

Real geeks

Over the next few years several more computers appeared in school, there was an actual computer room us older pupils could go into at lunchtime and some of my friends and I got hold of home computers. My family clubbed together and bought a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I played games on it but was much more interested in programming it so I bought computer magazines which in those days had program listings printed in them and taught myself Sinclair BASIC. However, a few of my friends had their own programs printed in magazines. They did A-level maths and physics. Two of them went on to Oxford Uni to study maths. One ended up working as a software architect for IBM (for over 20 years now) and the other wrote the software for the British Rail train timetabling system. These were Real geeks. I felt rather inferior.

Is there anyone, anywhere who has not seen the ‘Shift Happens’ video? It makes the point that the jobs today’s children will do haven’t even been invented yet. Actually, this has already happened to me and is what led to me connecting with my latent, inner geek.

I trained as a teacher and always used computers at college for assignments and even in little research projects with children collaborating on writing at the computer keyboard. So my computer use continued but my inner geek had to stay hidden as programming beyond BASIC was too difficult to get a start on the computers of the time.

It was only really when the web started that I came into my own and let the inner geek free.

On the computer every night

Much to the annoyance of my family, I started to spend increasing amounts of time on the internet. There wasn’t much to surf in those days but I got hold of an early WYSIWYG web page editor and that was it – I was away! It was no longer necesary to have a qualification in maths to build things for computers and the web. The key was having the right tool. After using the editor extensively, I started to get interested in what code it was producing and found that it wasn’t unfathomable as I thought – I could recognise the patterns and began to teach myself the basics of HTML.

The key is finding the right, simple tool

From that start, I moved onto PHP and other basic server-side and web technologies, working from books and the increasing numbers of tutorial sites on the web. I found I was really excited about being able to put bits of code together and making them do things – even without delving into the maths which made them work.

I also realised recently that music and languages share a lot of common features with programming – and I can do those as well with the right tools.

So as more and more easy tools are developed, I hope more and more people are able to connect with their inner geeks – it’s been great fun for me and I’m now proud to wear my official geek apparel – my wi-fi detector T-shirt – but only at technology events.

Kevin’s online profile is here…all the hook ups you need in one place.