Makers
by PD
About nine months ago, I wrote about visiting California and some of the ways of living I value. And previous to that post, I had written about visiting home and the different pace and practices of living. And over the past three days, I’ve witnessed some of the closest lifestyles to those I described nearly a year ago. They’re living right here in Chicago, and they call themselves developers.
I’ve always been proud of how I was raised in a home where we learned to do things ourselves. Cooking was by far the norm (rarely would we go out to eat), and we harvested a fair bit of our own produce and fruits. My mom made some clothes for herself and for my brother and I. We had a pool that we maintained ourselves, from checking chemicals to filter maintenance. A fair amount of our furniture at home was made by my dad and my grandfather.
The lifestyle was similar with the “hippy-esque” aura of Humboldt, where Jesse lives and goes to school. There’s a vibrant community of people who do make things themselves, for environmental reasons and simple pride in their craft. Locals support each other, from rabbit-hair clothing to local musicians to microbreweries.
In Chicago, I hadn’t found that as much. I felt odd for my desire to cook on my own, to build furniture myself, to hack together my own Halloween costumes; it was far from the norm.
That lonesome feeling changed with the introduction to the development community in Chicago. Home-baked bread with Corey Haines and Sarah Gray, making one’s own bratwurst (with homebrewed beer) with Eric Meyer… The light in the eyes of those three as they shared what they had created was something special, the likes of which I hadn’t seen often since coming to the midwest. It was the simple pride doing something oneself. The intrinsic value of DIY. It’s exciting. And makes me all the more eager to see where we can take Code Academy, to see if we really can create a institution for creating Makers, people who similarly see the value in taking matters into their own hands, valuing what they have done themselves.