When I was young, being a computer geek or a nerd was spending countless hours in front of a computer screen eating hot pockets for endless hours, being super brilliant writing the next great code that would somehow change the world. That’s what the movies and popular culture said.

I was told there was basically three paths one could take with computers – become a system administrator providing tech support, write the next Microsoft Word, or maybe become a game developer. I guess you could throw in web designer too. Chances were that as a boy from the sticks probably the best hope was to become a system administrator, baby sit servers and provide tech support for Microsoft Windows and reset passwords when people got locked out of their computers.

Being a geek in those days was a lonely miserable life, or so we were regularly told in popular culture. It was a life locked inside a windowless server room or a cubicle bull pen, a life working in a large suburb, driving from one’s tacky suburban home through a web of dead end streets in a Honda Civic to a massive parking lot in a suburban office campus of UniCorp Global to spend another day running job control lists from the List of Lists books. I actually had a job like that in college. I understand why people go postal.

Computer geeks weren’t allowed to have friends or go outside. They’re wasn’t time for playing in the woods, go hunting or fishing, you couldn’t live out in the country, have livestock or guns. Computer geeks were only allowed to have computers and live in the suburbs and work for UniCorp. Don’t you know the rules.

Computer science was about math and more abstract math. Calculus and endless integrals and imaginary numbers. Writing complicated and tedious code, spending endless hours debugging thinking about complicated code, impossible for mere mortals could understand. Written all by hand, by typing endless meaningless sentences that made no sense except to computers. No APIs or libraries to assist you, everything had to be done by hand.

Of course, things start to look different when you think about computers not as all encompassing but just as a tool. Not an ends, but something you use to better accomplish other parts of your life or business. Very rarely with computers do you use Assembly language or machine code anymore, and there are rich libraries, APIs and even drag and drop interface designers that do much of the hard work behind the scenes. Unless you are writing a compiler or a device driver, it’s rare to write low level, tedious pages and pages of code.

For some of the stuff I do I will do basic trigonometry although most of the knowledge I gleen is from examples on the internet. For things like understanding electricity and alternating current, some calculus is required but it’s not an everyday thing with programming. The precalcus and chemistry classes I flunked my way through really had no bearing on skills needed for writing code.

But I’ve also learned that being able to program and be fluent in many computer languages doesn’t mean giving up your friends, your hobbies and interests. And in most businesses, computers aren’t programmed for the sake of programming but to serve a business interest. You write code to support a farm’s record keeping, an insurance business claims or understanding a politicians election results. You don’t have to live in a big suburb to be a coder.

I’ve learned that learning technology and how to code actually saves time in the long run and makes you more effective in what you do. But technology is just a tool, it doesn’t have to be self consuming or dominate who you are. You can utilize technology to save time and learn without it dominating your life. You can have a life beyond programming.