It’s been a bit over two years since I started Coder’s Errand. All this time, I’ve wondered how this name resonates in my reader’s minds. This is a good time to reveal something about the name of this blog, why I chose it and how it represents my vision and ethos for it.
This project has lived longer than I could expect at the start, and has finally graduated into a professionally developed website. Before I go on, I want to express my gratitude to the people who helped me and developed it, and to my readers who have maintained the interest for these years. I hope this signals a new period of fertile and useful writing.
When I look around at other blogs, I can tell that Coder’s Errand is definitely not the most obvious name out there. As programmers know, naming things appropriately is often one of the most difficult choices when coding. It has even its own dedicated chapter in Clean Code, because conveying the right meaning in a variable or method name will make the code so much easier to read and maintain and even make comments unnecessary.
Incidentally, Clean Code is a great book, one of the most defining ones I’ve read as a programmer, and whose lessons I try to bring to work every day. I highly recommend it to my team and any developers out there.
But this blog is not a program, I did not have anything in particular to describe. No, I just wanted to choose something that could suggest, in a couple of short words, the angle I would take on this blog.
A Journey of Discovery
If you’ve been with me for some time, you may have noticed I have a penchant for fantasy and mythology. I like the metaphor of the hero’s Journey, a process of discovery and evolution, of facing challenges, learning and growing to something bigger. In one word, Life.
If Life is one big Journey, it is nevertheless full of many smaller ones. Since I started working in Blockchain, I have been immersed in one with many stops. I have had to learn the general concepts of the area, new programming languages and patterns, and deep cryptographic techniques. Simultaneously, I’ve had to juggle discoveries about myself, demanding childcare, career management and self-doubt, navigating a huge new City and interests outside work.
There is much more to life as a programmer or developer than just the everyday coding. There is much more to the person that each one of us is than the technical proficiency. But in the end, all of it supports or hinders our professional success.
The Coder’s Errand is about all of that. At its core, it’s the tale of my progress through all the stages of this journey, my adventure about programming. What’s more, about an adventure without a set goal, a wandering over a whole new landscape mixing technology, theory and even the outside world.
The Multiple Meanings of Errand
There is a multivalence to the word Errand that I find ideal for this. You can trace it to Latin errare, attested in the famous aphorism errare humanum est. In my native language, Portuguese, it still has a double meaning, lost in other close languages, of which the most frequent is ‘to make a mistake, to be wrong’. The second meaning, equally as old as Roman times, is ‘to stray, to roam, to go adrift‘, with a sense of unknown direction or destiny.
The two meanings can still be perceived in English. Originally, the verb to err would serve for both, but today it seems to holds only the first meaning.
Through the vagaries of language evolution, Errand is still associated with going away, but for a well-defined purpose, while Errant is closer to “being in error”, “disrespecting established rules, expectations or responsibilities”.
But if you go back in time to the Middle Ages, you’ll find the image of the Knight-Errant, with the strong ‘wandering’ connection. You may have heard of these before, and of their most emblematic but hapless representative, Don Quixote de la Mancha.
The Metaphor of the Knight-Errant
Don Quixote is one of the most famous knight-errants in literature.
The Knight-Errant is a figure of medieval literature that serves as the escapist fantasy of the day. In a time where tales were targeted at an audience of knights and noblemen, with the ghastly duties of war and the burden of administering their land, the Knight-Errant provided an ideal alternative: a Knight that roams the world without cares or other responsibilities than searching for adventure and upholding the values of Chivalry.
These are knights that would stray, roam, go adrift… in a word, vagabonds, journeying without aim, looking for quests where their skills could make a positive difference.
I like knights-errant. They embody just that sense of braving the unknown without a well-defined goal, without a mission that can ever be finished. They are driven solely by their passion, the belief their actions could contribute to the greater good, even if done on a small scale.
This is very inspiring to me, and mirrors what I hope to achieve with this blog. In the end, that is why I’ve chosen the new logo of this blog to be, precisely, a knight-errant in an active stance.
There is probably some subconscious assertion, in the evolution of these words and the mingling of these two terms, that to wander without a goal is a mistake. I think not: that’s what exploration is about, that’s how often new ideas, even new worlds, are found. That is an idea I’m comfortable for my blog to be associated with.
This blog is not the errand in itself, my journey as a developer is. I merely use this means as a record of my evolution. There will be mistakes. I will take wrong turns. I may have to double back on some decisions. But I will learn in the process, and I will find things I had not dreamt of reaching. Some of them may even have to do with the writing process itself.
Travel on…
Although the Coder’s Errand has often been quite focused on a narrow intersection of cryptography, blockchain and programming, I have started by writing about statistics and backing away from it; foraying into Solidity coding; Token-bonding curves and mathematical analysis; and even some random tidbits of computer-science basics. And I’m hopeful that more things will turn out to excite my interest and impel me to write about them and bring their tales to life.
More recently, these pages have ventured on subjects farther away from the hard technical bits. Work-life balance, music, or the occasional book. It is a natural evolution, in that I begin to be more confident of writing about the person behind the professional.
If you find yourself on a similar journey, growing in your career as a developer and facing the uncertainty of all the technologies you have to study; or if you find yourself without direction, battling to divide your time between life and work, don’t lose heart. Those are common plights and you are not alone.
I’d love to hear of your own views and your own challenges. You may find they are very similar to mine, and that thousands of other developers, researchers or professionals of all kinds share the same difficulties. I hope you can find in the Coder’s Errand an inspiration and even some useful knowledge for your own projects, maybe some solace even. And if you feel brave to do so, share your thoughts in the comments below. I’ll be glad to read from you.
In the meantime, keep reading and coding, and have fun doing so. And if you like what I write, please like and share.