Of all the characters in Nolan’s Batman trilogy, my favorite has to be Lucius Fox, the Dark Knight’s go-to man for acquiring fancy, state-of-the-art gadgetry which is employed, of course, to protect the citizens of Gotham.

Even if we put aside the fact that it is played by the amazing Morgan Freeman for a bit, there are numerous qualities of the man that one may be fascinated by. For me, it has to be his general nonchalance, the casual diffidence with which he speaks about gadgets in particular & technology in general and the apparent ease at which he is able to deploy (if I may) these uber cool things.

Now, lets cut away to a typical product discussion at Teamie (where I work and where we use Drupal as a framework):

Product guy: I think it would be interesting if our users could… That’d mean we would have to build a feature that… What do you think?

Me: I think there’s a module for that. We could look into it.

Drupal aficionados will, of course, fondly recognize the first phrase. It was only recently I realized how eerily similar this exchange is to the one between Wayne & Fox below: (4m, 15s if it doesn’t start there already)

Back to the story at Teamie:

(Two days later)

Me: Hey, so there was a module that did that. And here’s how the product looks with that feature baked in. What do you think?

And we take it from there. This has happened many a time with features both big and small.

It helps, I think, that Drupal components aren’t libraries or packages but ready-to-use web components.

While Fox may have an army of uncredited minions at his command at the R&D of Wayne Enterprises to do his bidding, Drupal is and has always been made possible by its amazing community of developers from around the world.

Last week, we had someone in for an interview at Teamie for a front-end engineering position. He was a sensible, smart guy who knew exactly what he wanted to do. But the best thing about him really is that he is a law graduate!

I was pleasantly surprised at the beginning. Still am. On reflection, it’s quite heartening and exciting, I think, to see how accessible programming has become. Our tools have now matured enough to lower the barrier of entry and attract people from other disciplines (not just because the jobs pay well) but because they find work here to be actually fun and rewarding - which is great! I’m pretty sure that this is not a fad.

It’s quite tempting to say that anyone can code these days. But I don’t think that’s quite true. As Anton Ego comments in Ratatouille on a similar quote by Chef Gusteau (I paraphrase to tie-in the context):

Anyone can code doesn’t really mean that anyone can become a great programmer. It just means that a great programmer can come from anywhere.

It’s funny how in the last two years alone, I have watched two films and twelve hour-long TV episodes of Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock movies, BBC’s Sherlock and CBS’s Elementary) while in the twenty years prior to that, I had just seen a single episode of an old Sherlock show on Pogo (didn’t really like it much).