Still Drinking

I lost interest in programming until about two years ago, when I went freelance. My first (and last) contract involved knowing how to code, but no actual coding. After a few weeks, I started coding in my spare time again. It wasn't to keep myself employable. It just scratched an itch.

Now, I live from a website I built, and coding became one of my favourite hobbies again. I wake up, make pancakes, have coffee, put some good music on, and code until I've had enough. It's not work; it's my definition of a good day. I'm not trying to build a product, or my resume. I just work on whatever feels interesting.

There's an article that changed my perspective on programming [0]. It argues that an app can be something you make for the delight of a select few, like a home-cooked meal. I've made many home-cooked apps since then: achievements for my personal website [1], a timeline for my personal life [2], and lots of small improvements to other private projects.

I guess the lesson here is that programming is a great hobby, but programming for money can be a soul-crushing compromise. I think you'd hate any other hobby if you turned it into a full time job.

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Every programmer occasionally, when nobody’s home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It’s a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and…

I keep pulling up one of my favorite bits on this attitude http://www.cs.uni.edu/%7Ewallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2018-10.html#e2018-10-21T09_53_29.htm - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26209541

> ...

> But I had enjoyed working on the hard projects I'd encountered in my programing class back in high school. They were challenges I wanted to overcome. I changed my major and dove into college CS courses, which were full of hard problems -- but hard problems that I wanted to solve. I didn't mind being frustrated for an entire semester one year, working in assembly language and JCL, because I wanted to solve the puzzles.

> Maybe this is what people mean when they tell us to "find our passion", but that phrase seems pretty abstract to me. Maybe instead we should encourage people to find the hard problems they like to work on. Which problems do you want to keep working on, even when they turn out to be harder than you expected? Which kinds of frustration do you enjoy, or at least are willing to endure while you figure things out? Answers to these very practical questions might help you find a place where you can build an interesting and rewarding life.

> ...

... And there's also Programming Sucks ( https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks ) which takes a rather hyperbolic style of writing on the subject.

The penultimate part of it is:

> Eventually every programmer wakes up and before they're fully conscious they see their whole world and every relationship in…

a) Cool :) and I definitely agree with the crazy part, I think I remember stumbling on this by chance and not quite being able to sensibly reconcile/accept what was going on in my head (neurologically) lol ("well that's broken engineering, hmph")

b) Thanks for the info - really interesting! By "video call that got stuck" I presume you mean everything just jumped forward, do you remember how you integrated/perceived that? I guess you weren't surprised because there isn't really a "THAT wasn't supposed to happen" intrinsic response for this as it's a behind-the-curtain area there's no need for the brain to anticipate :P

Just read through https://pmj.bmj.com/content/80/944/328... wow you really fell a dozen miles through a can opener there :( I can only imagine trying to sleep dealing with all *that* D: aaagh. (Actually no I can't)

For what it's worth I'd *definitely* read through a long-form run-through of what happened (and it's quite possible that a few doctors might as well given the sparse section on neurological impact in the linked paper), although my curiosity is checked somewhat by empathy. I guess it's a tradeoff between deferring recall/contemplation of stronger impressions and catching the most long-tail/incidental memory fragments at the edges of the mental map - the kind of thing for which there's no wrong decision.

I'm only aware of one other clinically-"interesting" experience involving severe lack of sleep, caused by consuming slightly too much acid:…

I actually disagree. People have a pretty good grasp of basic logic. The issue is that when we say "computers are logical", what we really mean is that you need to treat computers like someone who is missing important parts of their brain.

People are used to interact with other entities that can perform advanced logical inferences, deductions, etc in an intuitive way. They are at a loss when they're forced to dumb it down to "talk" to someone who needs to be told not to crash into the wall when being told to walk in a certain direction.

Worse still, when people do understand that computers are really dumb, but actually good at following orders when you treat them like a mentally challenged toddler, they get stuck again when even that fails; when they encounter application after application that does not operate in any logical sense, because they aren't programmed by other computers, but by lazy/dumb/stressed/ignorant programmers like me.

The best quote I read on this comes from this essay: http://stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

"The only reason coders' computers work better than non-coders' computers is coders know computers are schizophrenic little children with auto-immune diseases and we don't beat them when they're bad."

I absolutely love reading Justine's code. It comes up from time to time here and it just makes me happy. It reminds me of the passage from "Programming Sucks" by Still Drinking [1]

Every programmer occasionally, when nobody’s home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It’s a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world.

This file is Good Code. It has sensible and consistent names for functions and variables. It’s concise. It doesn’t do anything obviously stupid. It has never had to live in the wild, or answer to a sales team. It does exactly one, mundane, specific thing, and it does it well. It was written by a single person, and never touched by another. It reads like poetry written by someone over thirty.

Her work is always just a little bit trippy in a good way haha.

[1] http://stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

Scaringly accurate description of my job. On occasion I get to write code myself to solve a problem - but most of the time it is "go dig through 1,500 lines of mostly undocumented Javascript and see if you can make it do [this] instead of [that] without breaking anything".

What little documentation there is typically `TODO: FIX THIS` or `This was the only way this will work and I don't know why.`

Then you realize how much of the world's code is like this and wonder how anything ever works at all. I absolutely love this story [0] for explaining it in a way anyone can understand.

[0] http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks