Programming Again

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From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back; that is the point that must be reached.

Franz Kafka
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I came to Germany knowing that I wanted to write and certainly, I have been doing that. Applying for the one year visa seemed like an opportunity for a sabbatical, and transition in a new creative direction. Fiction was everything, and I was totally obsessed to the point where it took over my life, and almost washed away everything else.

I was driven to this extreme from seeking an exit strategy from programming. I was so fucking sick and tired of everything I had been doing, so pissed off with everything that software and web development entailed. I wanted out, I wanted a respite from the powerlessness and frustration of my existence being under the thumb of managers, business owners, and the constant barrage of drivel and that defines life in the client services sector. I was driven to rage by the incompetence, messiness, and clueless blundering of so many of the PHP developers I had to work with and manage. I couldn’t keep on working, doing jobs I knew I would have to hide from my resume. I was screaming for relief and the space to exercise my imagination in an unimpeded context.

And so as the late Northern summer faded into Autumn, I started writing. The more I wrote, the more I discovered new types of frustration – largely down to the lack of clear signals of progress (20,000 unedited words? where am I? How did I get here? Where is it taking me?), but most significantly, I felt I was missing out on the loop of feedback, audience input, and incremental, iterative testing and refinement that I learned the hard way after spending so long in the web industry.

The writing came and went in fits and flows. Always will. But there was something missing. It’s hard to explain the collision of forces and events that has occurred over the past several months. What became acutely obvious was that an exit strategy was not the right answer to my problems. I had to admit to myself that I am too fascinated with writing code, understanding code, and making things work. Too fascinated with computer science, with programming languages and the concepts that make these languages work. Unconsciously, towards the end of 2009, I found myself dabbling and sloshing around in the programming world again.

I can however, point to one particular event which had a huge influence on my motivation. People can laugh and make fun of me all they want, but I actually have a bachelors degree in philosophy. I have always found the overlap between programming and philosophy massively interesting. So this deconstruction of object oriented time could not have come at a more decisive moment for inspiring me to get out of my head, and start acting on my ideas.

I wasn’t prepared for this revelation. I had wanted to leave the mess and mistakes and miasma behind. I didn’t want to deal with the idea that perhaps I simply can’t turn my back on something where I have spent so much effort over many years trying to improve my understanding.

I never thought I would ever be capable of doing the things that I am able to do almost effortlessly now. Where once, I awkwardly thrashed and stewed over the most trivial steps of construction, now I can calmly roll out bundles of tightly bound, clearly structured actions in various different languages, with little stress or confusion.

Sometimes, people ask me how I can continue doing such different things. Writing, programming, design, making rap music... Surely they must conflict?

The answer is yes. There are massive conflicts. I am only, now, for perhaps the first time in my life, confident in my abilities in every single one of those crafts, and able to modulate my inner drive to be able to jump in and out of these different creative contexts with much more control than I used to have. This was not an easy state to attain, and it has been a massive source of stress and discomfort in my life for a long time.

It’s so relieving and life-affirming to know that all the torment did contribute to something – that I am benefiting from it in the long term, that I don’t have to sacrifice any one creative passion, just to succeed in another area.

Now that I have come to an acceptance of this, I want to place myself back at the beginning, to start as a nascent speck and cultivate an œuvre that combines my vision of computer science and of storytelling.

I know I am not at all good at programming. I have a long way to go before I can be deeply satisfied by what I know and what I can accomplish. Every day, I see things people have done that utterly blow my mind, and leave me gaping in wonder.

I am beginning to draw a much better outline of my weaknesses, understand what I am lacking, and finding the motivation to start learning, practicing, and growing again.

So if anyone asks – I’m probably writing. Maybe it’s code, maybe it’s fiction. Probably both. I would be utterly lost without one or the other.