Mon Père Est un Informaticien: Growing Up in a World of Logic and Creativity
When I was seven years old, my father handed me a tangled mess of wires, a circuit board, and a screwdriver. “Let’s build something useless today,” he said with a grin. Confused but intrigued, I watched as he explained how circuits worked—not by reciting textbook definitions, but by comparing electrons to “tiny, hyperactive messengers” racing to deliver notes. That afternoon, we built a blinking LED contraption that served no practical purpose other than to make us laugh. It was my first lesson in computer science: creativity often begins with curiosity, not utility.
My father, a computer scientist who splits his time between Paris and Montreal, has always viewed technology as a language—a way to translate imagination into tangible solutions. Growing up in a bilingual household (French and English), I quickly learned that code, much like human language, has its own syntax, idioms, and poetry. While other kids played soccer after school, I debugged simple programs with my father, who treated every error message as a puzzle rather than a setback. “Errors are just the computer’s way of asking for clarification,” he’d say.
The Early Days: Circuits and Bedtime Stories
Our home was a playground of half-finished projects. Old motherboards doubled as coasters; textbooks on algorithms shared shelf space with cookbooks. My father’s office was a sanctuary of humming servers and whiteboards covered in equations. Yet, what stood out wasn’t the gadgets but his storytelling. He’d explain recursion using Russian nesting dolls or describe object-oriented programming by comparing classes to “cookie cutters” shaping data into treats.
One memory that sticks with me: at age ten, I complained about memorizing multiplication tables. Instead of drilling me, my father opened a Python IDE and said, “Let’s make the computer do it.” Together, we wrote a loop that printed the tables—a simple script, but it felt like magic. Suddenly, math wasn’t about rote learning but about creating tools.
Learning Through Play: From BASIC to Raspberry Pi
My father’s approach to education was rooted in experimentation. When I struggled with fractions, he introduced me to Scratch, a visual programming language, and challenged me to animate a bouncing ball. The ball’s trajectory required calculating velocity and angles, which meant grappling with division and decimals—without even realizing it.
By middle school, we’d graduated to Raspberry Pi projects. We built a weather station that collected data from our backyard, and though the soldering iron mishaps left minor burns, the thrill of seeing real-time temperature graphs on a homemade dashboard was unforgettable. These projects taught me resilience. When code failed or sensors malfunctioned, my father would lean back and ask, “What’s the funniest way this could have gone wrong?” Humor, he showed me, is a powerful debugger.
The Beauty of Problem-Solving
What defines a computer scientist? It’s not just coding prowess but a mindset. My father often quoted Dijkstra: “Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” To him, the field was about structured thinking—breaking problems into smaller parts, testing assumptions, and iterating.
Once, our fridge broke down. While my mom suggested calling a repair service, my father grabbed a multimeter and muttered, “Let’s see if it’s a capacitor issue.” I sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor as he explained how capacitors store energy, comparing them to “water balloons” that release bursts of electricity. We didn’t fix the fridge that day (we ended up needing a professional), but I walked away understanding that failure is a data point, not a dead end.
A Global Perspective: Code Without Borders
Being raised by a French-Canadian computer scientist added a cultural layer to my tech education. My father often contrasted the Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” ethos with Europe’s emphasis on privacy and regulation. During debates around AI ethics at the dinner table, he’d switch between English and French, joking that programming languages were easier to master than subjunctive verbs.
He also emphasized collaboration. When the pandemic hit, he volunteered with an open-source project connecting developers worldwide to build contact-tracing apps. Watching him coordinate with coders in Lagos, Lyon, and Lima taught me that technology transcends borders—a lesson that inspired me to join online hackathons and collaborate with peers from Brazil to Bangladesh.
Legacy and Lessons
Today, as I study computer engineering myself, I catch myself echoing my father’s phrases: “Always prototype before perfecting,” or “A good programmer is lazy—they find the simplest solution.” His influence shaped not just my career path but how I view challenges. Whether I’m optimizing an algorithm or troubleshooting a leaky faucet, I hear his voice reframing obstacles as invitations to innovate.
To those curious about computer science, my father’s advice is simple: Start small, stay playful, and embrace the mess. You don’t need fancy gear—just curiosity. Try automating a tedious task, like sorting emails or watering plants. Or explore free tools like Codecademy or Khan Academy. The goal isn’t to “get it right” but to cultivate a mindset where problems become possibilities.
As for me, I’ll always cherish those moments of “useless” creativity—like the blinking LED circuit—because they taught me that innovation isn’t about utility alone. Sometimes, it’s about joy, wonder, and the quiet satisfaction of whispering to a machine and hearing it whisper back.
After all, as my father would say, «L’informatique, c’est l’art de dialoguer avec l’impossible.»
(“Computer science is the art of conversing with the impossible.”)
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