There was a post of mine on the Faith in Scholarship blog a couple of days ago. It begins as follows…
While I was an academic astronomer, I probably spent most of my time not peering through a telescope, but typing away at a computer, wondering why my code didn’t work. Now, computer software wasn’t my area of research, so I didn’t give much attention to it from a Christian perspective. But is there a Christian approach to writing computer software? Should we be “coding for Christ”?
In preparation for this post, I read an excellent little book on this topic: Shaping a Digital World: Faith, Culture and Computer Technology by Derek C. Schuurman, who is Professor of Computer Science at Redeemer University College, Ontario, Canada. Schuurman begins by posing the question, “What does my faith have to do with my work as an electrical engineer?” The rest of the book attempts to sketch out an answer, and it contains plenty of helpful insights for those of us who spend our time writing computer code. I’d like to share a few of them here.