Loop [68/100]

The final project of my Operating Systems class was to build a file system. I worked on it for almost an entire week straight, and it was the most complex thing I had built at that point. I was a permanent fixture on the sofa of our dorm’s common room. My roommates went to sleep while I was still coding and woke up to me still working on sofa. I’d take a quick break to walk down to Wawa for a sandwich and take bites out of it every half hour or so as I remembered to eat. It was glorious.

During this time, I somehow stumbled on a Japanese song in my music library, and put it on loop. I have no idea how I had the song, but it had a number of good qualities — I couldn’t understand any of the lyrics so it wasn’t distracting, it was pretty repetitive so it was a nice constant ambient sound while I worked, and it drowned out other noises. A few years ago, I also frequented turntable.fm’s “Coding Soundtrack” rooms which were mostly techno and dubstep, which were also good for coding because of similar attributes.

In a very virtuous cycle, I then associated that song with that period of intense work, and I could listen to it when I really needed to focus and turn it up a notch for a period of time. For the remainder of college, I reserved that song for when I could settle in for a few hours to work on a tricky coding project. It was a very personal and effective ritual that helped me get in the “zone.” By the time I upgraded my laptop, I’m not sure how many times I had listened to that song, but it was definitely well into the high thousands. Even today, I feel a little bit wrong listening to it while I’m not working. My work these days is much less based on hours of uninterrupted coding, but maybe I’ll bring it back to get through some gnarly issues.

I know nothing about the artist, or what the song is about. Here it is: