progress


i'd go to the office with my father when i was in grade school, and he'd park me in the copy room where i was allowed to take a few sheets each from the cubby holes of rainbow paper, and i was allowed to draw on the whiteboard around his flow charts.

sometimes, i'd look over his shoulder and watch lines and lines of code inch down the screen as he stepped through the debugger. 'did you write all of that?' i asked him; earlier, he'd taught me how to write a prompt that would record your name and give you simple arithmetic questions and grade your responses, and the effort it took me to produce a few dozen lines of code seemed monumental. i couldn't imagine how long it would take to produce files and files and files with hundreds and thousands of lines.

i didn't yet know what it meant to spend forty hours a week at the office, writing and testing and fixing programs. now i look at projects that i've pecked on for a few inches every few days, weaving together structures that grow into worlds, and perhaps i am starting to understand.

there's this life lived, and there's the recorded efforts that we hope justify it.

09 July 2018 22:59


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