Mile a minute... Thinking as a developer

[Bob]

The blur of ideas is amazing to me. I close my eyes and am lost in the blur and haze that has become what I consider my mind. I have been told that I think at a mile a minute, but that has never stopped me from trying to make a pit stop and clarify.

Recent events have forced me to reevaluate my course in life. Do I continue pushing myself as hard as I have been, trying to, eventually, become the idiosyncratic developer of software that I have always, vainly, thought I was. I think that it has been an interesting journey, and considering that one of the more prominent, and I must say influential in my life thus far, hackers that I have had the option of experiencing took to painting as well as I do to artistry, it may be inevitable.

As I look back on the past 6 years as a programmer I have experienced much that the world is willing to offer me, without relocating, and I have risen up the ladder to becoming a developer, rather than a programmer. The title may seem very similar to what a scout badge does to too many; it has been used for as long as I was a programmer to describe programmers, which is a complete untruth. A programmer may have a similar sleep schedule to that of what a developer does, but the questions that run through a developers mind in their day to day are far superior to that of a programmer.

The blur that I had mentioned previously is the tell tale sign of becoming a developer, often highlighted by the development of code as one sleeps, and often solving puzzles that were not possible in conscious thought. REM has forever been my best friend, in regards to solving issues plaguing me in my life and work. The truth is that we all use it to some extent. My mother used to think unconsciously about where my little brother was while I was on the computer late into the night; my father thinks unconsciously about what is going on with tiger woods golf stats while he is trying to sleep; I am an exceptionally lazy person in that I choose to solve programming problems while I sleep.

It did not take much time to convince my better half that I was in fact trying to solve problems when I was with her, which should really go to show the true problems with my mindset. There does not seem to be a point in time when my brain allows me to clear from the process of solving one of the many problems that I am currently trying to solve.

My only option was in fact to overload myself. I am currently working on five projects, in three entirely different programming languages, and all of them require my attention constantly. The problem is compounded by the fact that I have a white board that I continue to populate with more and more ideas of what I could do better than the applications that I currently use; things that I would rather applications did.

It may seem like a serious malfunction on my part, for me to continue to function like this, but the truth is, I have never been any different. My early life is pock marked with me having trouble focusing and often day dreaming of how things could be. One of my earliest memories is when my best friend, Bradley Taffel, and I were running around in the grass field at our elementary school with scaled versions of commercial passenger jets in our hands making all the sound effects that one would expect. The roar of a jet engine is at times welcomed at my present state of chaos, but I don’t want to give it up because I enjoy it far more than I would the other extreme.