The Dark Angle
64/
Emily joined the company a few months after me. We started dating right away. I thought she might be the one, but I wanted to make sure. We took up kayaking on the Connecticut River together. Nobody does that, so on most days after work we had the whole river to ourselves. Well, the two of us and her dog Snowby, who became our chaperone.
My life was starting to come together. I had my person. My health was in a sunny season. I was gathering the skills I would need to make some kind of dent in something, someday. It was almost enough to make me forget what I was up to. I considered buying a house in Hartford and settling down with Emily.
At work I put my heart and soul into that codebase. I’m embarrassed to admit it but it was some of the best work I have ever done. In a corporate environment you end up making a lot of compromises. It’s a matter of survival. I have always felt fortunate that on my first job I had the opportunity to get something right. If not for that I would never have known what it felt like.
It felt really good. After two years of hard work I had the problem of distributed state management solved, at least to my present satisfaction. After years of sucking at one thing after another, I felt like I had finally done something awesome.
There was just one problem. Our social networking service for college students wasn’t the one that was taking off. I began to envision other uses for the source code, but I couldn’t convince my boss. I didn’t own the code. This was a problem I had not thought about too much. As a musician, if you are good, everyone knows. It’s obvious when they hear you play.
But as a programmer it’s highly probable that you will work on things that no one will ever know or care about and it’s just business as usual.
I hate that.
I mean, it costs something other than time to build software, and I don’t like seeing my work go to waste.
In programming, making other people believe that you have done something valuable becomes another category of work altogether. I had been successful at something, but no one could see it. And there were no users.
Life was going great but at work there was nothing to celebrate.
