Beyond Code

These days I work in Emacs, but before then I lived in Vim/Tmux for 2 years. My youth though was never this technical nor was it officially programmatic.

I instead spent my time hacking, tinkering and breaking things.

I spent my time in primary school creating hidden folders¹ on my student drive to hide games from my teachers. But even earlier than that, I had a penchant for doing the wrong thing.

Beyond my relationship with the computer I got into trouble a lot, still do occasionally. I would eventually discover Kali Linux and the wonderful world of doing-the-wrong-thing in an environment that made it convenient to do so. Of course, this is not a place to preach my leprosy, but rather an opportunity to express gratitude for never being prosecuted for being a malicious script-kiddy.

As the years passed and I crawled out of my hospital bed², I lost touch with Linux. My family used Windows, and so I spent time learning the run-box, manipulating the registry, running rocketdock and deleting System32 every few weeks. I also experimented briefly with the Arduino and Microboard programming³.

By the age of 16, I had no technical knowledge of what I was doing. I spent time rooting and jailbreaking my devices; manipulating memory addresses as instructed to in some forum or YouTube video.

Eventually the cocoon of High School is shed, and at this point with no coding experience; I become determined to get into Medical School.

I eventually fail the UCAT and fool around in the Medical Science degree at USYD. I then crawl away from the wreckage enrol into a double degree of Computer Science and Commerce at UNSW.

My principle reasoning for choosing the Computer Science portion of the degree was:

to finally obtain a formal education in computer science from the bit level of abstraction

Of course, at the time I only had the first half of the previous clause: to obtain a formal education in computers, but to those of us who have taken a few CS courses, the PC is nothing but a masterful machine of subsequent abstractions.

Real reflections on the content of my course and the insulation wiring that surrounded the degree can be found in the corresponding blog post.

But, to summarise the degree, my tendency to push against the grain only resulted with me having my teeth kicked in. Specifically, I failed courses for attempting them exclusively in Vim, I failed courses for not learning and using the methods that they taught me⁴. My unsuccesses extend beyond academic life; I didn't get picked on the Frisbee teams I wanted to play for; I lost demerit points; and professionally often ended my employment on bad terms.

Mens conscia recti —A mind conscious of integrity

Despite all of this, a consequence of running uphill all these years is a transformation into a more resilient intellectual and powerful programmer. These days I'll happily use VSCode, or PyCharm or whatever proprietary software I must use to get the job done.

Perhaps, because I live quietly these days with a special someone and 2 little special somethings, that I can diversify my portfolio and keep the all-too-many stakeholders in society content.

The quieter you become, the more you can hear —Backtrack5