grantmichaels'blog

choose erlang, choose life

I’m comfortable saying that round one of grantmichaels versus programming is now a closed chapter in the book of life.  Yesterday I fabricated a false-importance to suit my ego by vaulting a trivial event into a internal achievement.  I can be very political when it comes to that which suits me, so when Nick Gerakines added me on Twitter before I was following him, I considered that the perfect closure to chapter one.  Maybe you are wondering why, maybe not, but for me it was to be interpreted as the second sign that somebody out there with vastly more immediate capability than myself became if only mildly intrigued by something I blogged about here, as the link to this blog is just about the only piece of information one has when viewing my Twitter profile.  So, Mike Pence see’s fit to buy me the Pick-axe and Agile Rails duo and that forms the introductory chapter to my metaphorical book, and then after exploring the vastness that is the terrain of deploying websites for 8 months, chapter one ends blissfully when I get a particular follower on Twitter the day before I attend my first Ruby meet-up.  I think people are far too caught up in their own existence far too often, and it’s always a good routine to force back one’s ego and consciousness to see how you are affecting the larger system of life.  I’ve checked out the fringe development that is taking place in Ruby on Rails, Squeak Smalltalk, Python, haXe, F#/.NET, PHP, and most recently Erlang (again) – and *finally* I feel a sense of place in working with Erlang.  So, while Nick Gerakines has absolutely no conceptualization that he’s defined a point of significance in my return to programming just by stumbling upon some tweet and following me, the fact is that this is exactly what happened in my reality.  Hopefully Nick won’t run for the hills, because this isn’t about Nick in particular – and I’m certainly not the ‘fanboy’ type – it’s about the feeling I now have with regard to coding in Erlang and my initial feeling about the community I’ll be a part of.

Speaking of, I had a distinctly positive feeling the other day when I realized I’m reading more textbooks, often hardcover, and less trade paperbacks from Apress and O’Reilly.  Again, maybe you smell what I’m cookin’, maybe you don’t agree – and truthfully neither of us care much in this regard so, “to each.”  The fact is, in all facets of life, I’m constantly re-factoring my processes to keep my focus on tracking mid-term goals, and to not get bogged down in both “all that is now” or the limitless possibilities of the future.  It is at once unfortunate though, that my nature is to obsess over the detail of anything that I’m passionate about.  My girlfriend sees days and weeks go by at times where I’m totally fixated on computing, although that isn’t something to boast about, really.  What had started with a couple of Pragmatic’s Ruby and Rails books given to me as a present, has become a renewed compulsion to create computing experiences for others.  I’ve been passionately hacking away at computers since the Commodore-64, sometimes more, sometimes less – and not at all for a meaningful 7 years – but there has never been a doubt that computing can provide an alternate reality.  As always, I’ve stocked myself with great tools (which hardly realize their utility) and surrounded myself with the best people I can find (that see fit to communicate with me), but that isn’t really what my programming is about, and I don’t think it will ever be such.  When I code, which isn’t as often as I’d like for reasons too numerous to list, I’m always alone and it’s usually dark outside.  Sure, there is much hypothetical to explain “the why,” but the reality is that I most enjoy the departure from reality that computing provides.  I simply find it easier to willfully suspend my disbelief in those conditions, when there aren’t many other stimuli and when there isn’t anything else I could even really do.  It’s been my experience that you either feel that, or you don’t – in which case you probably aren’t very inventive either – because there is pretty significant science/medicine regarding brainwaves at night despite wakefulness and how it relates to creativity.  Creating code that provides users a low cost of entry departure from reality, or a chance to feel more significant than (their) life, will inevitably add to your sense of wealth – be it spiritual if you give your creation away, or fiscal if you choose to package and market it.  I think it’s quite obvious within just a few moments when I experience software that is born of creativity and passion.  This has been and still is the only type of code I’m interested in working with, which is precisely why I am keeping my day job while I chase the dragons in my dreams.  When I decided to leave (abruptly) Arthur Andersen’s technical team in the early nineties, I swore I’d never code in a cubicle farm in my lifetime, and I intend to keep that promise.

So, I’ve read portions of hundreds of books in the past 8 months, amassing a beautiful and somewhat irreverent collection of quality texts and delicious (happy to not have to verify the location of the periods anymore in delicious) tags, and I can honestly say that I’m finally comfortable calling this blog entry the interstitial space between chapters one and two in this right of passage I’m calling a comeback book of sorts.  I’ve reunited with old friends who now wear gray-hats, talked with people who have been called gray-beards, and am experiencing nothing short of a technicolor landscape of opportunity – albeit, outside of the web browser.  That’s right, OOB, out of browser, without HTML/CSS/JS and most importantly without standardization, which I feel is a pure wrong-doing.  “Yes” I know why everyone wants it, and “No” I do not agree philosophically or emotionally. Standardizing is marginalizing is limiting and well, it’s a whole lot of brown.  Brown, as in the shit in the bowl.  It’s ok, we can agree to disagree.  Taking a stance and trying to make a difference should be given more weight, and more people should take a side and agree to disagree.  For me it’s about large deltas and responding to change as near to real-time as possible, hopefully if not actually organic and alive, at least providing the illusion of such.  Just like the brain is often used as a long-term model for processing tasks, so too, should the body be taken as a model for the entire system, and lightweight message passing is as close to hormonal regulation as you can get right now – and hormonal regulation is by far the most dynamic system in the body.  We’ve evolved as increasingly competent creatures over many centuries, but only have innovated computers over some decades, thus making the human the best model we have for driving innovation in computer science and technology.  Don’t you think it wisest to use tools which best approximate life itself?

I’m choosing Erlang until I feel something makes more sense fundamentally, because I can model my programs after something I know well – me, myself, and I’s processes.

grantmichaels