I was reading Jeff Atwood blog Coding Horror and he have a blog post about a critic that another blogger made to him, Atwood in his post talk about that we are all amateurs because programming itself is a very new thing, according to History of Programming.

“The earliest programmable machine (that is a machine whose behavior can be controlled by changes to a “program”) was Al-Jazari’s programmable humanoid robot in 1206. Al-Jazari’s robot was originally a boat with four automatic musicians that floated on a lake to entertain guests at royal drinking parties. His mechanism had a programmable drum machine with pegs (cams) that bump into little levers that operate the percussion. The drummer could be made to play different rhythms and different drum patterns by moving the pegs to different locations.”

As you can see that was at 1206, I think that’s old, Atwood doesn’t I’m still an amateur, in fact i’m not as good developing software as i’m playing video games, but another amateurs are doing a lot of good work around programming, in it’s not so new 802 years of existence.

That’s makes me think that amateurs are the one moving things forwards not expert, they have more intensity, dedication and motivation for doing such things even when they doesn’t have the skills.