Developer Paralysis: A Love Story

Tony Lukasavage
Aug 28, 2017 · 6 min read

This story is based on true events

Alright, kids are in bed, I’ve got nothing to do. Time to pour some bourbon, don my ridiculously large, gaudy headphones that no professional adult should wear, and work on a * DUN DUN DUUUUUNNN * side project.

Let’s write some code, make some magic, tread lightning to reach the lavender sky of open source bliss. But first, let’s pick some music… 10 minutes of searching nets no perfect inspirational music. I guess Daft Punk’s “Alive” will have to do for the 361st time.

This story will now be engaging in what’s known as “Daft Punk’s ‘Alive’ time”

Hmmm, I’ve got like a million little project idea notes saved… but I’ve kinda lost interest in all of these. What the hell does “empty duck stacking” mean? Ah, yes, there’s this build tool I wanted to work on for [REDACTED] like 6 months ago, let ‘s dig into that!

🎶 Buy it, use it, break it, fix it 🎶

I haven’t evaluated my CLI making modules in a while, and if there’s one thing that makes or breaks a CLI tool, it’s the cutting edge CLI technology. So let’s see what things are like with commander, nomnom, minimist, yargs are up to… hey, what’s docopt?

🎶 Around the world, a — round — the — world🎶

OK, I’ve learned nothing ground-breaking here. Let’s just stick with [THE THING I JUST SHOULD HAVE STARTED WITH] since it’s what I know, and things I don’t know are probably unnecessarily complicated. Alright, I’ll need to do some file watching for this tool as well. I would just use the fs module, but i heard about this chokidar module…

🎶 Amazing what you’ll find face-to-face 🎶

Man I had no idea fs.watch had all those issues. OK, chokidar it is. Now that I have the tools I want use, I suppose I should peek in on [REDACTED] just to see how woefully behind they are on the functionality I want to add.

🎶 (robot voice) Prime time of your life🎶

Huh… it kinda looks like they built most of what my tool would do into their CLI. I mean, it’s a pretty unwieldy implementation, but, you know, it’s there. Seems almost insulting to essentially piss on their work by creating my own. I supposed I could just try to contribute a PR to their project. Let’s peruse the source code…

🎶 Something’s in the air 🎶

OH MY GOD. This is the seventh level of hell. Or, is it nine levels of hell? I don’t know, but whatever level of hell is the last one, that’s the one this codebase is. I mean, for the love of god, you have to [DO SOME PEDANTIC THING YOU HOLD DEAR THAT DOESN’T REALLY MATTER IN THE GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS]. This is not worth my time and I wasn’t dying to write this PR anyway. Let’s try something else.

But first, let’s just take a gander at reddit and see what the selfless hardworking posters on the internet’s front page are up to today…

Man, that site is so meta.

As “Daft Punk’s ‘Alive’ time” has been long lost to the bowels of subreddits I’d be embarrassed to name, this story will now be employing “Nine Inch Nails’ ‘The Fragile’ time”

Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, defining my existence through something I choose to work on in the sliver of free time amidst career, fatherhood, and binge watching Netflix Originals. I’m drawing a blank. I mean, what am I gonna hack that hasn’t already been hacked, and like 100 times better. And if it hasn’t been created by someone smarter than me already, is that for a reason? Is my idea stupid? Is this that Impostor Syndrome I’ve been hearing about? I wonder…

🎶 The sweetest price you have to pay
The day the whole world went away 🎶

Yep, Impostor Syndrome. And apparently pretty much everyone has it. Sooooo, what’s the point? Now that I know about it… I am no closer to working on anything. I wonder what Twitter would think about a wry comment regarding the uselessness of identifying Impostor Syndrome in a sea of the afflicted…

🎶 I WON’T LET YOU FALL APART 🎶

Let the retweet riot begin! Holy… no… Trump did not just… he needs to be stopped. What the world needs now is my take on this Trump character.

🎶 You think you have EVERYTHING
BUT NO — YOU — DON’T🎶

Oh, hey, yeah, my editor is still open and blank. Christ, this is hopeless. I need some inspiration. I have a stack of new programming podcasts queued up that I haven’t listened to yet. Maybe something there will percolate my creative juices. Let’s give a listen, right after my favorite song on “The Fragile” is over…

🎶 TRIED TO SAVE MYSELF BUT MYSELF KEEPS SLIPPING AWAY 🎶

“Nine Inch Nails’ ‘The Fragile’ time” has been aborted after a song that is tragically ironic. Productivity, efficiency, and the passage of time have no relevance anymore in this mire of distractions that are more seductive than thought-provoking work.

OK, let’s see what these podcasts are all about…

Oh my god these are the most boring speeches I’ve ever listened to, and I’ve been to church. Oh, looks like Joe Rogan has Neil DeGrasse Tyson on, wonder what that’s all about…

Eddie Bravo was a grappling innovator with the rubber guard but he’s a fucking nut job on this flat-earth and 9/11 stuff. Alright, I need to come up with an idea to salvage this night. At least an idea. What would Eddie Bravo do? Probably smoke a bowl and question the legitimacy of the moon landing. Ugh, this is getting me nowhere.

Spotify is now angrily set to shuffle

🎶 We took this trip to Garden Grove 🎶

THINK. There’s got to be one solid thing you can do tonight. Just learn something if you can’t create something useful. Make a todo app in something new, pick a fucking framework or SDK or whatever, just start fucking typing. You can do this.

But… which framework? How do I know this is one worth diving into? Let’s start evaluating the pros, cons, use cases, dev opinions, repo activity, community involvement, and fucking star alignments to see what framework I should be using…

🎶 The most feared duet
since me an Elton
played career Russian roulette🎶


🎶 And godliness, empty, just like MMEEEeeee🎶


🎶 Feelin’ funny in my mind Lord, I believe I-I-I’m fixin’ to die🎶


🎶 nana-na nana-na nana-na nana-na-na-na🎶
(“Take Me To The Pilot” you uncultured swine)


Jesus, these reviews of frameworks are so confusing. It’s almost as if the effectiveness of a framework is based solely on a developer’s willingness to commit to it. I’m sure this is a lesson I will retain indefinitely.

Well, in any case, the framework I’m settled on is [IT’S NOT IMPORTANT] and I’m ready to… holy crap, it’s 1AM. Well shit, now I’m tired and it’s too late to really get into something new. Might as well check out “Ozark” on Netflix. Or perhaps I’ll just write some self-flagellating story on Medium about this utter and complete failure of a night; a cautionary tale to warn others of all these mental and digital pitfalls.

But I’m not really that good of a writer and I’m not really sure where to start. Should it be technical or prose? Should I see what Twitter thinks would be useful? Is Medium really the best place to be writing?

OH MY GOD DOES THIS EVER END?!?!?!?!?


No. It doesn’t. Stop thinking about and preparing to do something and JUST DO SOMETHING!

)

Tony Lukasavage

Written by

@tonylukasavage / director at @innovullc / ex @appcelerator / JavaScript / node.js / startup junkie / Pittsburgh / anthony.lukasavage@gmail.com

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