As much as I love using consumer electronics, I don’t want to be someone that spends their entire lifetime of computer use simply receiving what people make for them. I want to create things for me to use, for others to use. This is why I am a computer scientist. I care about why computers were created, how they operate, and what they’ll be doing, because I’m a part of that now. Even though creating is so much harder than consuming, it’s far more rewarding and worth every second of agony trying to find that stupid semicolon or looking at examples, asking peers, and reading texts to figure out how to get started, how to fix a problem run into, and how to make our work better.

If you don’t want to create, how can you be a computer scientist? It’s not just creating software, but creating ideas and innovations in computing that benefit some larger good. It’s true enough that we can’t be creators of everything; civilization would be a but a start-up if everyone had to create everything for themselves and no cooperation was permitted. But it’s also equally true that some people are called to create something for someone, and computer scientists are those people.

While normal people sleep, we create things in the silent, dark, and mystical haven that is the night, keeping networks and systems operational, turning an absolutely zany idea into a real product, and dreaming of ways to improve the things that we have already made, not simply to do so, but because doing so sharpens our ability to do all the rest. Few who consume in the night are as productive as those who create in the night. Overly romanticized, to be sure, and no one gives a flying crap about who does what when when it comes down to it, but I find tremendous motivation in working when no one else is, learning when everyone’s on vacation, operating when everyone’s shut down, and creating when everyone’s consuming.