Have you seen the movie The Social Network yet? Well, for those of you who have seen it already, you know that it’s a story about how Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook. But for those of you who have not, let me tell you this…you will appreciate the movie even more if you are a web programmer like me. More than whom you ask? I would say more than the average Facebook user.

Let me expand on this and explain. In the movie, The Social Network, the character playing Mark Zuckerberg mentions a lot of technical jargons that only programmers and computer geeks like me would understand. He talks about things such as PHP, Apache servers, and MySQL databases. If you are the average Facebook user and are not technical savvy, you would not know what these things are and would not understand what on earth Mark was talking about. Needless to say, you don’t need to. But if you are technical savvy, you would know that these things are all related to web programming. I know that it’s something that I can relate to and it’s one of the reasons why I really enjoyed watching this movie.

But there is more. If you watch the movie carefully in the beginning, the movie focuses a lot on Mark’s computer screen. In one of the scenes, Mark’s computer screen display programming codes that only web programmers like me would understand such as the <p> and the <i> HTML tags. The <p> tag and the <i> tag means “paragraph” and “italic” respectively in HTML programming. Of course, if you are not a programmer, you would have no clue to what these tags mean and would not understand this particular scene in the movie.

If you listen carefully, somewhere in the movie, one of the professors refers to the 8086 processor. Or was it the 8088 processor? I can’t remember exactly. Anyhow, this is another technical jargon that refers to the microprocessor chip that was introduced in the late 1970’s. I remember growing up and I had one of these microprocessors in my home computer. This is definitely something I can relate to and another reason why I enjoyed watching this movie.

So, as you can see, there are more than a few instances in the movie where it gets “technical”. Because Facebook is used by over 500 million people all around the world, The Social Network is a movie that will most likely be talked about for years to come. But if you are a computer geek like me with knowledge in web programming, you would enjoy watching the movie more than the average Facebook user.