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This story hits close to home for me. As one of the countless others like me on Hacker News who started out their educations and careers with so much promise, all I feel anymore is this tremendous sense of failure and missed opportunity. These days I think of programming the way I think of working out: intense bursts of focus on creativity for maybe 2-4 hours if I'm lucky, and then hours to days of melancholy because the tools and methodologies I'm using are all garbage. Examples of mainstream trash: ios, objective-c, flash, php, c++, 802.11, usb, xml, html5, mpeg, mp3, dram caches, opengl, just on and on and on. Literally every tool I use on a daily basis, every file format, every communication protocol, everything, all fatally flawed in some way. My life has been an almost complete waste. I don't know much about IDE/ATA but it must be quite a garbage dump to traverse. Turning that into something clean like a socket/file reference is remarkable. Just think of all the things that don't work on hard drives: how they fail to write the last bit of data in a power failure or maintain directory consistency, how they were so far behind on caching and hybrid flash/platter drives, just on and on, a tower of babel of remarkably cheap but inadequate hardware. Dealing with that, and the layers of politics that perpetuate such monstrosities would be enough to drive a person mad. Thank god I'm not depressed though. I was severely out of it from 2000-2010 for a lot of obvious reasons but I finally let everything go and have never been happier. I. Am. Not. Depressed. It's glorious to say, I feel it all the way to my core. Life can turn around, and one day you'll wake up and realize that you don't give a crap about solving the world's problems anymore, because it's all too far gone. It's not your fault. Just find your niche and reach some level of sustainability, and save the world later. |
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf