I’ve recently been thinking of my life in terms of narratives. A series of stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Stories have themes and motifs and foreshadowing. Stories have a purpose, a telos, an end towards which they inevitably converge.
Except humans are adept storytellers. The easy way to make the story fit its purpose is to start with the end and write backwards. You can find the pattern as you go and make sure everything harmonizes with the end. I’ve been giving in to the temptation to place myself at the end of my story and write backwards as if everything was building up to this moment.
One such story is a story about skill. I was a tinkerer at heart from a young age, always playing with legos and knex. Building robots and programming rudimentary games. In school I found computers to be a natural outlet for that creativity, and nobody was surprised when I majored in Computer Science.
School was just the beginning though. Software brings with it a bottomless depth. Not only are there endless troves of extant work, projects and libraries and frameworks and patterns all delicately intertwined, but more is being constantly added. A Red Queen’s march where you have to stay up to date on constant exponential innovation just to have a hope of not falling behind. Small wonder that a common complaint among long tenured developers is that they feel like they know nothing at all.
I got a patch merged into GNU Emacs this week. In the story about skill this is a zenith. Not only do I proficiently use the editor that is widely seen as impracticably complex, but I know web server/browser interaction well enough to spot a bug, and I know my way around a lisp codebase well enough to patch it, and I know enough about open source software development to be able to submit a patch and get it merged. Good job me.
The story doesn’t have to go that way though. Maybe it’s better to say that I was a dreamer than a tinkerer. I rarely concerned myself with whether my robots worked and I frequently had to be prodded to take my projects beyond the imagination stage. What attracted me to computers was their capacity for whimsy and their natural affinity to a world of ones own design. What better way to capture the creative beauty of collaborative worldbuilding than patching the web browser built into a text editor?
Or perhaps I am a stubborn non-conformist glad to finally assist the FSF in their rebellion against the forces of corporate control. Maybe I just want to impress my peers and mentors and I’m drawn to the prestige associated with a feat few of them would bother to match. Maybe it’s been a stressful couple months and having a little tech project like this to check in on is just my way of staying sane. Maybe doing this was neither difficult nor personally meaningful, and it just happens to be the first time I found a bug I could actually identify.
The patch is real. The narrative depends on the storyteller.