This morning I was reminded why I quit software development 5 years ago. My experience, always:

  • “Let’s do this!”
  • (5 mins) “I’m actually making this thing!”
  • (6 mins) smash into pain wall
  • (28 hrs no sleep, eating, lose touch with everyone/everything I love) “It works!”

Repeat.

The Eureka at the end was always the greatest feeling, but I never found a way past that middle part, even after years of experience.

I consider that experience to be the Flow State’s evil twin. It’s SORT OF like Flow (lose all sense of self, dive deep) but just very, very bad.

Another thing I always hated about programming: There’s ALWAYS another deeper layer of abstraction to remove, and that moving-between-layers-of-abstraction is the ONE thing that programmers, for whatever reason, never communicate to each other, even when trying to be helpful.

A thing that hangs up a programming task is far more likely to be a simple misunderstanding about how a shell interprets a certain command in this mode a missing curly brace, not the figuring out of the real problem.

Constantly getting hung up on dumb shit made it excruciating.

Now, I may simply have learned to program wrong. I may not have a mind for it. I may have just never crossed the rubicon where things start to trend easier (I tried hard…).

Or I may just be so obsessive that I don’t switch enough to pursue a different way to the same place.

Anyway, as I was writing this thread, with the help of my friend and colleague Carlos, I figured out how to get this node task working to control an external video switcher via the serial port.

The feeling is really good. But I burned up my whole morning worried about this shit.

I will continue to stick to designing things, writing stories, and coming up with ideas, but build them in software, I will not. At least not in current programming environments.

Thank God for Carlos and all you superstars like him.