As you might expect, working on a single project for two hundred and thirty-three days (averaging nearly eleven hours a day, seven days a week) yields a fair number of ups and downs. And the longer it goes on, the more the highs and lows become amplified. Meeting a normal, everyday goal feels like winning the lottery. And in contrast, every little slip-up or setback feels like the end of the world. So yeah, there were plenty of both, but guess which stick with me the most?

It’s probably just plain ol’ human nature to focus on the negatives and ignore the positives. I assume it’s related to some kind of deep-seated survival instinct. My reasoning there is that people who were overly focused on the positives and ignored the negatives got eaten by cave lions before reproducing.

But I digress.

Setting aside how the long hours affected those around me (and that’s a lot to set aside) I could probably break down the negatives into two categories: 1) feeling bad about the task at hand, 2) feeling bad about life in general.

Task at Hand

Software development, in concept, is simple. Using a well-defined and structured language, compose a list of instructions for the computer to execute. It’s like a recipe:

1. Preheat oven to 350.
2. Mix flour, baking soda, salt in a bowl.
3. Mix together sugar and fat and vanilla extract.
4. Stir dry ingredients into wet.
5. Dollop dough onto cookie sheet.
6. Bake.
7. Remove.
8. Eat.
9. Repeat.

Except instead of making cookies, you’re doing something really fun, like adding numbers together:

10  LET A = 5
20  LET B = 10
30  LET C = A + B
40  PRINT C

See? Easy peasy. This short program displays the value “16” on the computer screen. Wait a second. That isn’t right. It should be 15. Lemme look this over again. A is 5. B is 10. C is the sum of A and B. Yes, I’m sure of it. The answer should be 15. But it’s printing “16”. *sigh* Okay, once more. THE VARIABLE “A” IS FIVE AND “B” IS TEN SO “C” CLEARLY SHOULD BE FIFTEEN SO WHY AM I GETTING 16?!?

Repeat that for four hours until you realize that you haven’t been debugging the code you thought you were. Suddenly you realize that your editor had loaded up a file on one computer but you were executing another older copy of the code on a completely different computer: one where both A and B were eight.

It’s at that point you go from I MUST BE SO STUPID TO THINK THAT 5 AND 10 COULD ACTUALLY BE 16, to a brief OMG, I FEEL SO MUCH BETTER CONFIRMING THAT I AM NOT STUPID, to NO I AM SO STUPID BECAUSE I WASN’T EVEN RUNNING THE PROGRAM I THOUGHT I WAS.

Granted, in the depths of slightly more advanced software development (where you have to not only debug the simple A and B variables but also the fifty-seven libraries and frameworks between A and B) one might think one could be forgiven for “obvious” bugs. But no, this “one” is very hard on himself.

But I digress.

The takeaway here is that sometimes software development is difficult and no matter how smart you are or how long you’ve been doing it, you’ll spend four hours late one night questioning your skill, your sanity, and your very existence.

Life in General

Yeah, about that last point. It goes like this:

• Negative Thought: You just spent four hours on a mind-numbingly simple problem.
• Positive Thought: But I figured it out! Yay! I am so smart, I am so smart!
• Negative: But it took you forever, dummy.
• Positive: But now I can move on to the next thing!
• Neg: Ha. The next thing. Four more hours of something pointless.
• Pos: It’s not pointless. I’m doing this for a Reason. This project has a Purpose.
• N: Yes. And in six months it will be obsolete and you’ll have to do it again.
• P: What makes you say that?
• N [sarcastically]: Oh, I don’t know, maybe because that’s how the last thirty years of your career have gone? Everything is temporary. Everything affects only a tiny circle of people around you.
• P: But . . .
• N: Don’t interrupt!

I could, of course, continue this exchange for hours. Believe me, I have. It’s so easy to descend from a harmless “I’m so busy” thought into full blown existential nihilism. Like:

• I’m working on something important.
• But so are the other dozen people on this.
• And the hundreds around us.
• And the thousands, millions, and even billions beyond that.
• How are we any different than ants scurrying around a remote forest floor, collecting food for the one and only purpose of making more ants?
• And isn’t the earth going to be engulfed by the sun in five billion years anyway?

Told you it was an easy descent. But there’s also an easy way out. You see, even though the planet is going away in five billion years, I have a mortgage payment due in thirteen days.

Tune in next week for the third and final installment in this cathartic series. While today’s post ended on a somber note, not unlike The Empire Strikes Back, next week’s post will be filled with more positive things, like gold bikinis and Ewoks.