A Day to Celebrate Programmers?

I am embarrassed to say (as someone who corresponds with devs on a very regular basis) that I wasn’t aware that there even existed a day of recognition for programmers. Should I be sending a Hallmark card? A figurine of a developer over a keyboard? Some legacy code to fix? Now that I know International Programmers Day is celebrated on the 256th day of each year, I will keep that in mind moving forward.

Programmers are an integral part of everything. One could even go so far as to say that the world runs on programmers (sorry Dunkin, but it’s true). I have been fortunate enough to work with them nearly my entire professional career, beginning with little start-up in Seattle through my job today with Apress, a publisher of content that runs the gamut- from .NET, Spring, Python, Java, React, Vue, Rust, Objective C, Go and beyond-- for developers, authored by developers.?

Over the years, I have worked with many incredibly smart coders to publish books and videos for their respective communities. They can be exacting, quirky, and on occasion downright arrogant, but on a whole as a professional community the “common thread” I notice most consistently is that they are passionate about what they do. They want to share their knowledge and are ready and willing to pull up greenies and junior devs by the bootstraps to teach them something new. You don't see that in a lot of industries. I have tremendous respect for that.

So today I’d like to give an extra special thank you to programmer Alessandro Del Sole. I am glad to see a new edition of Visual Studio Code Distilled publish. I believe this is the 5th publication (but who’s counting) that we have collaborated on and while we have never met in person (Italy is on my bucket list), our email and voice exchanges over the years have always made me smile. Alessandro is always cordial, responsive, humble (though he need not be), timely, and a real professional. About authoring the new edition of the VS Code book, he sums it up best, and replete with that great passion that I mentioned above.?

“I wrote this because increasingly developers worldwide need to work with different technologies, development environments, and platforms to build modern solutions. Visual Studio Code is a great tool when it comes to crossing the boundaries of multiple technologies. On the one hand, it helps developers with a strong Microsoft background to feel more comfortable with technologies that are new to them, and on the other hand it simplifies the path for all developers to build cross-platform solutions. This is particularly important for developers who are not familiar with the Microsoft stack, and that at a certain point they need to reach out, and for those who are used to work with multiple technologies with different proprietary environments.”

So a big hearty thank you to Alessandro and all the incredible developers out there. And to those folks just learning to code or interested in coding, explore! There is so much out there. Keep trying until you find a language and platform you feel passionate about!