What is your favorite technology?

We've built so many things, as a species. Planes, roads, scissors, aglets, BAGS! Technology, all of. There are many things that we find useful and necessary for modern life.

Like foods, I'm sure we all have a favorite technology.

I love computing. I love building on ideas that started in my brain and transforming them into work that a bit of rock and electricity could chew on to produce something.

As you write software, your idea slowly takes shape. You start with a blank canvas, or editor, and plop some characters onto the screen, and somehow that can create numbers in computer memory that have meaning.

While most of the code I work on is produced professionally and are not strictly my ideas, I do have one project that I've made entirely outside of work that I'm proud of. Lifegraph. It's a small Python package that produces a grid of your life, in squares. It's only an implementation of an idea that I stole from Tim Urban's blog, but it was still a project that started with nothing and eventually had an ending.

The first programming language I learned was Python. I have a special attachment to this language because it directly led to a career that brings me a significant amount of contentment. I've met colleagues who have become friends (one even officiated my wedding!), learned to build complicated things like an ODE solver, created a scientific package for Python, even. All this, because the first professor I had, Dr. Tiffani Williams, made learning Python so very fun. One of our last projects involved making graphs with matplotlib. I suppose it's no surprise at all that my very first Python package involved creating a graph of my life. I'm sentimental.

My actual favorite technology is language. The representation of ideas using a few symbols is one of humanity's most impressive accomplishments. Every single idea that we have can be written down. It can be exact, like math, or wonderfully inexact, like the double meaning behind phrases like "Bless your heart", which, where I'm from, is a way to say "There's something wrong with this situation, but I'm not going to say it directly". At least sometimes. Other times, people may quite literally mean they wish for your heart to be blessed by some (usually a particular) deity.

Language is expressive. It's complex. It's simple. It can be very symmetric, or vary from sentence to sentence with unexpected complexity. You can make someone laugh or cry. Language can comfort. It can describe and be described. Language allows us to commemorate events in time. We can walk into the past with a bridge paved with language.

We can accuse, inflame, and scorn with language. Or reach for understanding, resolve differences, and build up other people—all valid uses of language.

Language can describe true things. Language can lie. We can explore fantastical worlds that don't and will never exist, in detail painted by masters of language. In my opinion, it is the most powerful, abundant, and helpful piece of technology that has ever existed.