Winning People with Code

Last Monday, myself and Laknath, met with Jervis and his lovely wife Himashini, for what it turned out to be the first unofficial meetup of Punch users.

Jervis is an electrical engineer from Australia and he runs his own company, where he teaches Python to other electrical engineers (well, it was fascinating to know that our power plants are controlled from Python scripts). Jervis has been one of the early adopters of Punch and he contributes to make it better. Couple of weeks back, he emailed me saying he's visiting Sri Lanka and would love to meet me for a coffee. I was flattered by that compliment itself.

So on last Monday, Jervis actually came to Sri Lanka with his wife and we met in the evening at Tintagel. It was amazing to listen Jervis enthusiastically explaining how he uses Punch to host his video tutorials and how it simplified his workflow. We discussed about the future of the project, what can be improved and what other interesting tools we can integrate with Punch. Our chat didn't only stick to Punch. We moved on to many other interesting topics such as hacker culture, how to learn human languages quickly (thanks to his wife, Jervis can speak Sinhala quite well) and even how to make ice-cream at home (meanwhile, our evening got extended from a coffee to a wonderful dinner). Jervis and Himashini were really nice people and we shared a lot in common. I'm glad a project like Punch, helped us to be friends.

This is the beauty of writing and releasing code. Many still think of coding as an isolated battle with a dumb machine. Very few would believe, if you say you can win people with code. But it's true.

Almost all the projects I open-sourced, were originally written just to scratch my itch. I never thought that others will find them useful or contribute back to make them better. But the messages I receive via GitHub says otherwise. I realized that with every piece of code we write has the potential to make some kind of an impact on others' lives. I see code as a powerful form of expression, which can bring people around the world together.

If you love your code, share it. The feeling you will get when others fall in love with your work is just amazing.