Eureka of nothing

My sense of satisfaction lies between the peaks of two euphorias. The first is built upon the anguish of failures and then its subsequent turnaround while the second rises from a desire to extend the trail of proof that I once was. It is not subject to or backed by academic relevance, pretty compliments or a massive medal on my neck. But this seemingly noble reward mechanism is a bane in its own right. It has led me to where I am today. A crater I’m clawing my way out of.

A thousand years of flipping hot pancakes

I began scratching my first lines of code roughly two years ago, trusting a shimmering hope that writing JavaScript and building webapps was equivalent to making myself useful. An idea that bordered on a brazen college dropout basking under a million dollars of seed funds with nothing but his faithful machine and a few servers hooked up in the closet. A longstanding delusion that still persists in fragments. Or shrapnels that have lodged deep into my flesh. Decidedly, I never got around to unsheathing the scimitars of the evil algorithm drilling regimen that bled all other programmers to death. Instead, my journey has forever resembled a hapless pursuit of knowledge and learning. The only morally correct framework of living. Nothing that so much as hints at grandstanding on cringe job sites to seek appraisal or echo one’s desperation. Something my peers are conditioned to withstand, participate in and pass on.

I program not because I champion FOSS but because my self-indulgence knows no better. It is the singular force that kicks me out of bed and makes me do what I do. To engage in what humans are best capable of, learning and creating. It has, for one, established a questionable cycle where I constantly need to keep the ground truth of being an adult in my crosshairs in exchange for productivity and for another, curbed me from liquidating my happiness in search of acceptance and credibility. I can confirm that the latter is not layered in irony. It is my very position of truth.

Writing is sometimes a conscious attempt at projecting my miserable traits. Traits of a friendless jerk who’d always dump his disdain at people setting out to make a career, work for their sake and find peace. Call them meaningless cogs in a grand contraption built to churn money. A Scrooge who professes contentment but cannot live with his shortcomings. It draws me away from this vile manifestation of a sociopath and lets me reason and seek clarity. But does it truly help?

That remains to be seen.

Lone straggler on the slope

A certain genre of people rely on a cushion of hubris to assuage the damage when things fall apart. Their esteem, although brittle, springs back up to take the helm and guide themselves out of the maelstrom. It’s both beautiful and heartbreaking, for they only lead themselves to another.

I have, on more than a few occasions, woken up with a swarm of green github dots plastered across my face whose lushness only increases with the rattle of my keyboard. I cannot stop till the surge of fervour is washed away on the final commit message and I sink back in my chair for the first time in days. But when the dust settles, perusing through my repositories is no different than taking a dreary walk along a mass of gravestones in the quest for treasure. A vain attempt to find meaning and reassurance in one’s past is just one of several ways of denial.

With time and the dusk of human programming, when the functions I painstakingly wrote for my notes app will no longer be a testament to my abilities and all my quirks will have assimilated into the silicon beings, I will perhaps feel respite and no more a failure than Wozniack.

Loving is living

When the symptoms of my unavailing efforts take root, I ask myself.

Do I love what I do? Sometimes. Do I love what I stand for? Yes. Do I feel it when I do what I stand for? Unquestionably.

This stretches the kinks in my faith till they flatten out and pull me ashore. I still relish piecing things together like I always have. I still pour out the inquisitiveness that I get from my mother on everything that’s thrown at me. And I still shriek on compile and hold my breath when the heavens deploy the containers. That is when I feel truly at ease deep down, even if it’s for a brief passing instant, before the stillness of my life slingshots me back to earth.