WHY.

I want to start talking about the classic question “Why?”. My friend Derrek Payton and I started talking about making tonight (Making is the word we “Makers” use to reference building things in general) and that conversation evolved into how to give people a reason. The why of it all.

We were talking about how to get people to show up for classes on “How to do things” in general. The hackerspace we work on (Root Access, Fresno) has a multitude of tools for the contributing community to use but we have a fundamental problem of “Why should people be there?”. We ran down this subject for a while until I said that I am horrible at marketing and that if anybody in any industry has any magic power it’s people that understand marketing like a science. That’s straight sorcery.

But after that we started talking about the fundamentals of making, and how making really starts to feel like you can do anything because making always just boils down to “How can I manipulate this material?”. For wood there are wood tools to manipulate the wood and they are not always so dissimilar from tools used to manipulate metal or plastic or foam. And one tool for metal will be better at all metals vs a similar tool for wood. Solder is used for electronics and Brazing for bicycles because that makes the most sense for those things, and Welding is used for car frames which is Melting the same as soldering but where welding melds the two materials together and Soldering and Brazing melts onto and molds to it’s subject to create the same joint. We do each of these things because we figured out it’s better for this or that, Why did we Braze bicycles? Because, with a steel frame, the joints last longer against the harsh vibrations of a road bike and not to mention were more comfortable on the rider. Why do we Weld car frames? Because it’s a much stronger bond and a car frame can be extremely rigid for a number of reasons including that the material is simply thicker. In essence, the why’s of Making are easy to find. We need this thing to be strong that’s Why we learn about metallurgy so that we can make more advanced parts that last longer or can carry more weight or move faster or be lighter. The why always feels like a direct cause and effect.

So we started to talk about how coding was harder to see. For example it’s easy to say to make a variable, and maybe your concept for why we do is “Because we need to use it later”. But what about… Where does it go? What even is a variable? Why do we make it the way we do? Why, in C, do we need to define the type of variable that it is? For me these questions plagued me and I struggled to focus on the concepts of using the language that various resources and lessons were trying to explain. I couldn’t understand why we used them a certain way without understanding why the way exist.

Once I figured this out, I said, I felt that I could understand any language. Many developers say that all languages start to look the same, like that you’ll see some similar concepts and functionality in C++ as you might in JavaScript; Loops, Functions, Variables, the general narrative stays the same. And this is so true and I needed to understand what brought the language to life almost from a mechanical perspective. Why do computers work the way they do?

I start to feel like I’m a little kid asking “Why?” over and over again but at some point I stopped caring because it’s how I best understand things. I still struggle with some political concepts because I don’t understand why certain parts of the political system exist.

And so with that, we went from talking about how do we get people to see the “Why?” in coming to our hackerspace, what’s the reason, what’s the progress, Why do they need to learn how to make a wooden stool? To talking about how insufficient the concept of why is in our society. Why don’t we teach the why more? Nobody wants to learn multiplications tables. But I bet we would if we had a reason to need them every day. I just need someone to give me a good why.