Winter in New York is strange when you’re not use to it. [Usually I keep these sort of reflection posts visible to FB employees only, but I thought this one might be interesting to my friends and family] I’ve been out the last week with some flu thing - feeling a lot better now though. I’m prone to exaggeration and I have the fortitude of a two year old, so, I thought I was going to die. The days basically involved trying to waste time when I couldn’t sleep, for me that meant Reddit and The Sopranos. In my freezing Airbnb I thought a lot about the warm parts of the world, and how to get there. A few days into the illness, I decided on Northern Queensland, maybe near Cairns [0]. This is probably the result of where I’ve lived - half my friends (and all my family) are in Australia, and the rest are mostly from Seattle and New York. This means my newsfeed is full of either blue skies or grey skies. It’s summer in Australia now. The photos of friends and family in Australia convinced me that people couldn’t get the flu there. A little too much time was had planning how to retire there as early as possible. I now know too much about the Cairns property market. I also don’t think I could get a job in Cairns, it’s not exactly the silicon valley of Australia. So, my new life goal became to reach a certain dollar figure such that I could snorkel until death do me and my snorkel part. With this in mind, I went back to work today. I’ve recently been working on what I call operational stuff, rather than just coding. It takes more than just building castles in the air [1] to keep your messages working. It takes testing, planning, tweaking, alerts, graphs, and much more. Today, however I got to go back to those castles. Being able to think creatively again was more fulfilling than I remembered. In my head, software engineering involves writing code to get from point A to point B. In reality it is: 1. Start writing code 2. Realize this code has this other function/file/class to change that you didn’t think of 3. Make the change or reevaluate your approach 4. goto step 2 This repeated act of problem solving is probably tiring to most people, but programmers are always optimistic about the end goal [2], and we get a perverse feeling of happiness finding creative solutions. Today everything clicked when I could template a function to save a bunch of code. It is fun. I’m lucky I’m one of the strange people that enjoys this. Even more so, I’m lucky I’m one of the people who gets paid to do this, because I’d still be doing this if I wasn’t paid. I came into work today planning on trying to do whatever I needed to retire to that beach. I’m still working late in the evening because the creativity in building those castles and in the inherent problem solving is too much fun. It’s a luxury that we can grapple with self actualization [3], but my goals and motivations are a complete mystery to me. And, I that’s OK for another 10 years. [0] https://goo.gl/maps/2Z1T1 [1] goodreads/quotes/69102-the-programmer-like-the-poet-works-only-slightly-removed-from [2] swizec/blog/programmers-are-optimists/swizec/4509 [3] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 02:56:33 +0000
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