forking paths and extenuating circumstances

It’s almost half past five here and I can’t sleep. The streets are empty, the sky cold and clear. Here, away from the big city and its glittering carpet of lights - cold blue and yellow and red, the eyes can turn to the sky and pinpoint the Big Dipper and the Small and a brilliance of other constellations whose names I don’t know. Their old exhausted light started its journey to this moment long before I walked or talked, long before this field where I stand and look was plowed and sowed, aeons before this country where I am now was formed and fought over. Someone else will be marvelling at their beauty long after I am gone.

2017 was hard - not because I was alone and in a foreign country. That, by now, has become my de facto mode of existence. My accent has been whittled away to nondeterminate lilt in the way certain words step off the tongue and it now leaves the listener with more questions than answers about where and when. Pasts can now be used and discarded, a paper-cup convenience. But being alone together with millions of people, meeting their eyes awkwardly in the rush hour Tube crush just seconds before they give their attention to whatever is going on in the little simulacra running on their phones, the feeling of being untethered and not being able to read a map of whatever terrain I was travelling on, was not why this year made me feel as though I’d aged 40 years instead of one.

I left my job. On the surface, it was, of course, a voluntary decision, and yet, below the surface, I was paddling too hard to stay afloat in the crisscross of currents. It broke me and left me empty and edgeless, a piece of discarded wood spat out by the lowtide Thames. I wasn’t sure I could swim the water again or even dip my toe. But more than anything else, I was a disappointment, a let down, a quitter. In the immediately aftermath, I spent a few weeks staring at the muted grays of a ceiling (one assumes it had been white in another lifetime) and replaying those words and images of failure on repeat. A sickening feeling made a home in the pit of my stomach. I had destroyed everything (career, future, financial security etc etc) and I wasn’t even sure how or why I had done it. What felt like an aeon ago (even though only 3 years have passed), I had made a choice to try technology as a career. Like all choices made with incomplete information and infatuation with an image, the reality of the daily papercuts (with my infinite gratitude to Julie Pagano for first introducing this phrase into dicsourse about an individual’s lived experience in technology) has been hard to reconcile with the initial joy of producing programs.

I can’t help but think all of the things that I hoped would but didn’t happen, did so because I never tried hard enough. The mind’s natural defense against this is, of course, to make a laundry list of ‘extenuating circumstances’, something to point to and say ‘here, xyz is why I failed at abc’. It’s the kind of spirit that lives in the canned response we sometimes get from a good friend who has lent her ear to our troubles, whose sympathetic voice says, ‘But you could not have known about cde, otherwise you could have done fgh’. This is not to say everything is in our control, when it is obviously not, but this idea of being powerless in the face of the nebulous ‘xyz’, the ‘circumstances’ that slowly, sometimes suddenly and violently, drift beyond our control, has seduced me into thinking that I am not responsible.

Whether I made the mistakes I made this year because of ‘xyz’ or because of faults of my character, I want to make the next year about responsibility and focus, about carefully curating the no’s and yes’s. In the infinitely quotable, 1961 Vogue essay ‘On Self-Respect’, Joan Didion writes, ‘Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.’ I’ve been infatuated with so many things, I’ve hardly stopped to think about the price of any (this can be applied to work, technology, conferences, writing projects - the etc’s here are infinite for sure). There is a cost (that ever-present spectre of the FOMO) to saying no. What the FOMO-obsessed of us don’t know, is that sometimes the price we pay for always saying yes is even higher. Saying no forces one to think about what is important, what really matters, what really ought to be the focus of our fleeting time and skittish attention.

words and typos

Yesterday morning, I woke up, and like any proper millenial internet addict, immediately reached for my tablet so I could check up on the usual suspects - the tweets, the emails, the likes. Little dopamine fixes like these get me out of bed and in front of the tea/coffee cup (if you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you’ll know that I’ve been writing more social media quitpieces than is healthy for any single individual).

An email from TechCompanyA was in my inbox and I happily clicked on it. In fact, given my previous experience and the recent interview grinder I’ve been through, I probably had no reason to be happy, but I so desperately wanted it to be good news that my brain automatically switched what could have been to what was until it was confronted with the words inside.

It said, with a bit more empty embellishement and some typos sprinkled in, that my programming ability was not good enough for the team. Then it wished me the best of luck.

It feels as though my whole career has been nothing but luck. No skill, just blind luck and maybe a bit of affirmative action. It could be true for all I know.

Several weeks of effort to prepare, two phone interviews and a take home coding assignment that had taken a week of work to complete were condensed into a sentence that said ‘thank you, but you can’t sit with us’. Except this time, it’s not because I am 14 and not wearing makeup, skinny jeans and a smile when the captain of the track team walks by, it’s because something about those lines of code I wrote, zipped and shipped was not cool.

At least, in high school, we were clear on these kinds of boundaries.

Now I’m left to wonder. I wrote tests and READMEs. I checked that the sample program ran. I did my best to organize into libraries and modules, to be DRY and make sure I checked all the YAGNIs. I was sure it was as SOLID as I could get it.

But I’d broken some undocumented rule that states what code written by ‘real engineers’ looks like.

In the end, it wasn’t the words that stung the most, but the typos - not really subtle typos, but typos that any half-decent spell-check would have caught right away. The hours spent preparing, coding and on the phone weren’t worth a few clicks to get the spell check to autocorrect.

Aside from a whole other set of ‘suggestions’ I might get from HN and other helpful online strangers (‘why do you think the company should bother responding?’ ‘why do you think you should get a job?’, ‘you just don’t interview well’, ‘you need to study more’, ‘don’t complain’), there is one thing I’d like learn from this: if, in the future, I am ever in a position to hire someone else and decide to reject the candidate based on a code sample, I need to be clear about why instead of saying their coding ability was not up to the standards of the team. If the company has clear hiring criteria which were used to judge the code sample in question, then there should be clear reasons why the code in question was not up to standard.

This August marked my three year anniversary in the technology industry. I know now a lot more than I knew back when I finished university and I’m not sure how long I want to keep going. Every day is filled with ‘this is not enough’ and an ever growing to do list of daily practice and routine: trying to work on open source, pushing personal projects to Github, working on the actual work I get paid for, practising data structures and algorithms, learning new programming languages and tools, going to meetups, writing conference talks, organizing study groups and workshops. The joy I used to feel for writing code to solve problems has been packaged into Github stars and activity graphs, JIRA tickets and sprint boards, velocity points and burndown charts.

I recently walked out of an interview. The interviewers set a blank stack of papers in front of me and told me to start implementing data structures. When I got stuck, the questions were repeated in slower and more frustrated tones and the air inside grew hot and bright lights irritating. When no one spoke and my pen was not busy flying sketching code on an A4 (because that is totally how most of production ready code gets written in daily life), we all sat in silence, marvelling at my utter stupidity for not being able to conjure implementations of things that surely any programmer worth his salt could do. I wondered many things: why I couldn’t solve this simple problem, how on earth had I passed their online coding test and initial phone screen, why was I here, in this room, with these people, who had no interest in being here and were probably wondering why they had to waste their time speaking to me instead of coding/sitting in meetings.

So I got up, straightened the papers and said thank you, I will see myself out.

hiraeth

Published on 6th of May, 2019. I first started writing this post after giving a talk at PyCon UK 2017 and catching the late afternoon train from Cardiff back to Paddington. I wanted to capture something about what I had felt on the whole trip - the feeling of being almost alone in a train carriage, speeding through an almost dark countryside, watching as the lights come on in thousands and thousands of homes, wondering what kind of lives are lived behind those windows, under those lights. I never finished this piece, but I wanted to publish it as is in case someone finds solace or inspiration in these words.

Hiraeth

Hiraeth is a Cymraeg word without an English definition. Perhaps because it is one of those words that is more than a simple thing, but a complex collection of feelings that spills over.

I am on the late train from Paddington to Cardiff. The towns and villages come and go: Reading, Swindon, Bristol Parkway. The crowd in the train thins out. looking out at the landscape receding in the opposite direction, at the millions of little lights and lives I will never know about.

I think, here alone in the train, I understand hiraeth a little bit. It’s a homesickness, but for a home that may no longer exist or may have never existed. A place that germinated at a particular time and with particular people and then dissolved into fragmented memories and pages in old albums that are looked at when someone moves or passes.

There is hiraeth for the childhood home, but not for the actual walls and doors and rooms but for the skinned knees and yard games and winter mornings sledding in powder snow and building snow men. The time when the world was made of possibility, without disappointment and despair. The excitement of knowing that the road is still ahead and not behind.

There is hiraeth for places that we may never visit, that only exist in the mind.

watchalong

It’s 2 am in London and for once the neighbourhood is asleep. I should be too, but when the brain is buzzing with all kinds of cool programming and writing ideas, it’s hard to lie still in a quiet room and meditate on sheep counts.

So here I am: in my natural habitat, in front of a screen with a keyboard under my fingers and a braindump ready to be parsed into text format. As with all ‘omgsuperawsomeshizzideas’ I have in the middle of the night, this text might turn out completely awful, but here goes.

One of the perks of living in a city with a sizeable tech community is the number of tech meetups that are regularly hosted at various local tech companies. Yesterday, Ana Balica from PyLadies London was facilitating a watchalong - a meetup where attendees gather to watch and discuss a technical talk from a relevant conference. The talk selected for this meetup was Brandon Rhodes’ PyCon 2010 talk The Mighty Dictionary.

Although I was a bit skeptical about going to a watchalong (I usually listen to conf talks as background while cooking), this proved to be one of the best meetups I have been to in London to date. Ana paused the talk after every 10 minutes or so and the group discussed the technical points presented on Bradon’s slides, clarified any confusion and tried out some of the concepts in a live coding demo. I can certainly say I learned a lot about hashing, what happens when the last three bits of two hashes collide, how resizing works in Python, why the iteration order of a dict depends on its history and why you cannot add a new (key, value) pair into a dict while you are iterating through its existing elements.

The best kinds of meetup talks leave you chomping a the bit to learn more about the technology or topic presented. Six hours post-meetup and I have tons of Python dict questions I want to research. In fact, I’m so excited about the humble (or maybe not so) Python dict, that I can’t sleep. That thing that most people running on CPython happily take for granted is actually a complex piece of code machinery that makes sure that even in unlucky situations with multiple hash-collisions, the dict lookup performance stays good. How did Guido et team come with this design originally? Who was the first developer to implement dict resizing? What is the exact algorithm that determines what happens in the case of a hash collision in a three bit dict? Can the design be improved? How do other languages handle hash collisions and resizing?

If you are a meetup organizer and are struggling to find suitable speakers or just want to try an awesome new meetup format, I highly recommend trying out the watchalong.

ataraxia

Today, I promise, I will finally quit.

In every programmer’s life there comes a time. That time when the only way to save production from cataclysmic p1 inducing collapse is to do the unthinkable, rm rf, CREATE UPDATE with a little SQL that you haven’t used since you were a little skid testing (just testing) that website for a SQL injection vuln. You curse the ORM that’s dulled your taste for raw SQL as you spin up the terminal, punch in your commands and then you say a little hail stallman, turing, pike, but not djikstra because he’d just laugh at you and your little spaghetti objecti orientati.

Then you hit enter and for an agonizing second (or ten if you’re running on a hosed linux that’s trying to recover from hosting whatever blog just became the viral hacker news punching bag), you watch and wait until the cursor returns.

Omg, fuck, every profanity in the book, it’s done. We’re in the green, boys, back up and running, making money, let the HN commentary cornucopia continue. Phew, wipe off that primal fear of a SQL statement gone wrong and watch your kibana go from red to green in soothing undulations.

This is the kind of moment that turns your adrenaline curve into a violent mountainscape.

But dammit, quitting social media should not make you feel like this. My cursor is on the deactivate and my mind filled with that primal rm -rf fear.

Careful now, one click and your umbilical hive mind cord is gone.

With a promise I ve failed to keep now three times, I stare at the deactivate button.

It’s all about the dopamine you see, the neuronarco says and taps on his temples. A heart lights up on the screen, a microdose of approval from a stranger or maybe a bot. You give them what they want, he continues. The sense of belonging without having to belong, low barrier to entry, almost impossible to exit.

A piece of the technojunkie soul flies up to the upload heaven.

It’s October 2008 and the world is sending large waves molten hot panic all the way to my corner of the north. I watch the ticker tape of numbers and symbols omx, dax, nasdaq, the collective value of the world reduced to angry red downward arrows.

They run a series of stock images of people in dress shirts and pressed trouser making intense eye contact with computer screens and then a talking head telling everyone in the audience to consume, consume more so this sputtering engine of an economy can come back to life.

If you buy shit you need and shit you don’t need, you’re doing something, you’re contributing.

If you share, click, tweet, you’re contributing.

It starts small. You share a snap of that hipstah morning latte and your avo toast and rant how the tube is perpetually crammed (it’s the Millenials, if they’d just mind the bloody gap, we’d all be fine).

The road to techno-mania is paved with small doses. Spaces vs tabs. Haskell vs scheme, spaghetti code vs lasagna code. The likes keep raining, like little well rationed shots of warm and fuzzy that explode on your screen in a rain of little red hearts.

T-2

T-1

It’s gone. Cut off.

For a while the phantom pain lingers and the musclememory autopunches the keystrokes for the url. But even these neural sputterings can fixed with a little vim applied to etc/hosts.

This is your brain on silence and boredom and the real world where things are not measured by likes snd retweets.

In the silence and boredom, there is ample time to inhabit memory, peruse the archives, dust off the gramophone (or the ipod if you’re memoryware is slightly more up to date). Maybe you’ll even like the music.