Today In my Lang class I got an essay prompt about the relevance of Public Libraries in 2022 — a rather simple debate. As I started going through the provided sources, I had a pretty interesting reflection: None of what you see from my today would exist without public libraries. I love this story, and figured I’d be an appropriate time to share since this prompt reminded me of it.
When I was pretty young (elementary school) my mom moved right next to a public library (within walking distance, even for a third grader). I was pretty excited; we didn’t have a computer in our house and I’d be able to walk over and play roblox or what have you — and I did. Countless summers and Saturday’s I spent over there, playing games and screwing around on the library computers.
When I got a little older, and found an interest for programming (this is a separate story but essentially I wanted to build a discord bot & realized you had to code it), i had a computer but it was broken & I didn’t have money to get it fixed. I started reading docs on my phone & using a python interpreter app at first, but then I realized I could just goto the library — so I did.
My first time using VSC, making my GitHub account, using heroku, effectively programming for the very first time — all at my local public library. Effectively, the early beginnings of my entire first project (a little discord bot called AppBot, originally built in py) was entirely built at the library, and I learned everything I needed to build it there, too.
So, what’s my point? Without this public library, it’s likely the case that I wouldn’t have started programming. The literal only reason I jumped in was to build a discord bot, which I committed to making before I even knew you had to program them (assumed it was just some website). If I wasn’t able to simply walk to the library in order to program, I wouldn’t have built it, and wouldn’t have another reason to dive into software. In the same token, if my mom moved to a different house, same deal. Could insert a lot of events here (goes back to my “life is a blockchain” post)
If it isn’t obvious yet, I argued that Public libraries are an incredibly valuable and relevant resources in 2022, even though they look a little different than they did when Franklin created them. Sometimes it’s small stuff like this that truly has major effects on your life, and it’s important to be great full for the resources that helped you along the way. And of course, for all of this, Thanks be to God.
Good afternoon DeSo❤️ God bless
2 months ago
