Wizard

A strange thing keeps happening in my professional life: people keep calling me a wizard¹.

Its not because of my large beard or pointy hat, I’m sure, but my skill with the computer. As the famous aphoroism goes:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

- Clarke's third law

However, I’d posit:

Any sufficiently proficient practitioner of technology is indistinguishable from a magician.

- A logical conclusion

While technology as magic is not a new concept (though I think there is a lot more to be said about it), I think likening me to a wizard is more correct than either of my colleagues realised. In particular, if they were likening me to a wizard in the Dungeons and Dragons sense.

Hear me out.

Wizards: Scholars of the Arcane

Though the casting of a typical spell requires merely the utterance of a few strange words, fleeting gestures, and sometimes a pinch or clump of exotic materials, these surface components barely hint at the expertise attained after years of apprenticeship and countless hours of study.

- Player's Handbook

In the TTRPG² Dungeons and Dragons (aka D&D), player characters take on one or more classes such as Rogue, Fighter, Druid and so on. Of the twelve classes³, eight can cast spells but each has a different source of arcane power.

The defining characteristic of Wizards⁴ in the DnD universe is that they have obtained their magical prowess through intentional academic effort. Unlike Clerics who’s power stems from their devotion to the divine, or Bards who weave literal magic through song and dance, wizards are comparatively normal folk who “simply” achieve magical mastery through practice.

I think there are some humorous parallels between the classes of magic weavers in D&D and real-life technologists⁵ I know.

I’ve met C# Clerics who, through their devotion to their god, .NET can perform inexplicable feats, deploying to AWS, Azure and Mobile⁶. Lisp Sorcerers who, via some innate talent with parenthesis, conjure “simple” magic that “rewrites itself” using nothing but ed.

I know managers who are Druids: shaping the magic innate in the universe (already written code) who have outsized effects because they know that less is sometimes more.

And, recently, then there are the Warlocks. These magic users are sworn and beholden to Fey patrons (LLMs) from which they derive their arcane ability. In the end they just end up casting Eldrich Blast writing React apps to solve everything.

School of Transmutation

To you the world is not a fixed thing, but eminently mutable […] You weild the raw stuff of creation and […] your magic gives you the tools to become a smith on reality’s forge.

- Player's Handbook

Whenever someone told me I’m a wizard, it was after they’d come to me with a seemingly insurmountable problem which I solved in under a minute with some short bash script (or q in one case). To me the problem seemed trivial and I was surprised with the reaction I got.

But looking back, it was only trivial because I’d been thinking in a certain mindset for years. I’ve been programming since I was around seven⁷ and sometimes find writing code about as natural as speaking.

I’ve been disassembling things (sometimes literally) and fiddling with the insides as a matter of habit and its yielded the insight that nothing is fixed in stone: everything can be tinkered with. Its also shown me a large toolbox to go and tinker. I have spent years climbing shoulders of giants, often not making it to the top, but this does mean that I can sometimes point out the easy paths.

Being a Wizard does come with its downsides though⁸, and lately I’ve been considering multiclassing. I think I’ll always return to my library to try out some fun new experiment and some spells are just too handy, but sometimes you need a little more Bard or Barbarian in your life.

P.S. Play Baldur’s Gate III. Its excellent. Or even better, some D&D with friends!