Spying on you guys is so much fun

I'm glad you're getting your feet wet.

> I never thought I’d be “playing with APIs”, but turns out programming is easier than I thought it would be. Ruby is a lot more fun than the C++ I learned in engineering school. Hours after everyone else in the house went to sleep last night, I was here in the office with 10 tabs open in Chrome. I was not facebook stalking or reading #binder tweets. I was learning how to sort hashes so I could make a list of our top 10 apps by event collection size.

As an engineering-degree earner, I concur with her. I learned C, C++, and Java and decided I didn't want to be a programmer. When I got into a job where I had to use Ruby to do data-gathering and site building, learning it was much, much easier than I had anticipated or remembered from com sci classes.

Part of it is obviously already knowing the abstract concepts in programming and knowing one's way around a command line. A good part of it is the abundance of online, amazing and free resources to learn from (hence, the 10 tabs open in Chrome...and hell, even that browser flexibility is a nice boost) compared to what we had 10 years ago.

But the ease of executing a script is a huge part of why programming seems "easier" than we remember it from Java classes: if I could've learned arrays through scraping live data and aggregation, the concepts would've been much more interesting to me.