Like a lot of you, I know a fair amount about computers and like all of you, I know someone I can call who knows a lot more about computers than I do. You need someone like that because no matter how much you know, something will eventually go wrong that requires way more savvy than you possess.
I was just on the phone with my person-who-knows-way-more-than-I-do and we were fixing something. He gave me this great quote which came from a gent named Maurice Wilkes who was — according to Wikipedia — "a British computer scientist who designed and helped build the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), one of the earliest stored program computers, and who invented microprogramming, a method for using stored-program logic to operate the control unit of a central processing unit's circuits."
He was talking about debugging (studying the code of a program that ain't working to figure out why it ain't working) and he wrote…
By June 1949, people had begun to realize that it was not so easy to get a program right as had at one time appeared. It was on one of my journeys between the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs.
I heard that quote and I thought it would resonate with a lot of folks who read this site but who don't write computer programs.