Why I Studied Journalism as a Developer

I used to think learning outside my field was pointless. I'm a developer. Why would I study journalism or marketing? Just focus on coding and get better at that one thing.

But when I was 20, I had a student magazine. I was managing about twenty students writing for it, paying them $2 to $5 per article. This was long before ChatGPT—they actually had to write the articles themselves.

I needed a way to tell if they were doing good work. So I studied journalism—not because I wanted to be a journalist, but because I wanted to understand the craft well enough to judge their work.

I learned what a "perex" is. It's the opening summary at the start of a news article. One term among dozens of others.

My first big programming client needed online banking software. In our first meeting, they mentioned wanting to add a blog to their landing page. Nothing to do with the software I was there to build.

I used the word "perex" in that conversation. Something like, "You'll need a good perex for each blog post." That moment won me the deal.

Not my coding skills. Not my portfolio. One word from a field I thought was irrelevant to my work.

This keeps happening. I've spent my whole life learning things that felt pointless at the time, only to use them later.

In high school, I learned video editing. Seemed useless for a developer. Then in journalism school, we had to edit videos—turns out I already knew how. Now I'm using it again for TikTok, building a personal brand.

Nothing happens in isolation. Maybe fifteen different things have to come together. Remove any one, and you don't get there.

You never know which one will be the thing that matters.