From Prose to Programming
I’m a Java developer turned C developer turned web developer turned assembly developer turned Bioengineer currently falling in love with Design. But it wasn’t always so.
There was a time I was a writer. I aspired to be just like my late aunt, Margaret Ogola. I aspired to walk that road to its fulfilment: publishing a novel. In those early days, I would write almost on a daily basis: short stories mostly, snippets into fictional lives.
Then slowly almost imperceptibly so, I noticed the same personalities featuring over and over in these slices of fictional lives. So I started writing a book. I started writing in an old school, paper exercise book. Exercise books were hard to come by for my family at that time. So I wrote in pencil, erased, made changes, revised and when I was more or less happy I confirmed the page in pen. It was an enjoyably slow process.
Exploring contrived lands. Creating and crafting fictional characters. The writing process was rewarding. The most rewarding however was the words. Discovering them. Getting to know them. Studying them, with all their nuances and etymologies. At about 60 A4 pages in, I lost it.
I lost my manuscript. 60 pages. Handwritten pages. Gone. I stopped writing almost immediately. Every time I tried to continue writing the I would remember those fallen characters, gone forever. The loss was just too much for me. It was like a foreshadowing of Bloody Sunday. It was also the beginning of the end of my path as a writer.
In my despondent state, I stumbled across code. I was not strong enough to resist the allure. And so my future as a writer came to an abrupt end. If I had not been so enamoured with tinkering an old MS-DOS Dragonball Z game, I may have mourned the path I left behind. But code is addictive.
I went on to study software development at university. And lectured in the field for 4 years. During that time I noticed that the more proficient I became at writing code the more I often I felt a faint feeling of Déjà vu. I could never put my finger on it. Sometimes it would bug me and I would search actively for the source; other times I would completely forget about it. At one point I realised the feeling was stronger whenever I encountered a particularly elegant piece of code. And when I discovered Pixie it all fell into place.
One day while I was scrolling through my twitter feed I came across a tweet about a new and obscure programming language, Pixie.
Like a good developer I looked it up. The syntax was hypnotic.
;Pixie syntax
(loop [x 5] (when (> x 0) (print (str x "\n")) (recur (- x 1))))It was so different, so fresh, yet at the same timeless like its ancestor, Lisp. The feeling of Déjà vu was so strong at this point that I could finally put my finger on it. It was the same feeling I used to get when I found myself lost in a dictionary while looking for the right ‘synonym’, the one that had the exact nuances I of what I was trying to convey. And just like that, I rediscovered the writer in me. A changed writer. A developer/writer amalgam. But a writer nonetheless.
The funny thing is that while reading up on Pixie I came across Medium. 500 stories and a year later I’m ready to start writing again.
