Coding

I wrote my first programs on paper. Not because I was romantic about it, but because I didn't have a computer. BASIC scribbled in school binders, logic diagrams in notebook margins. My parents thought I was doing homework. I was, just not the real one.

Twenty-something years later, I'm still writing code. The paper's gone, replaced by too many screens and a persistent ache in my wrists. I've written COBOL that made me question my life choices. I've debugged production systems at 3 AM while my kid slept next to me. I've watched entire codebases I poured myself into get sunset because someone with a spreadsheet decided the market wasn't there.

Ruby saved me, in a way. Not the language itself—though its syntax does feel like coming home after years of sleeping rough—but the community around it. Particularly Why the Lucky Stiff. _why showed me that code could be weird, human, broken and beautiful all at once. That documentation could be art. That disappearing was sometimes the most honest thing you could do.

These days I run Flexcode Software, which is less glamorous than it sounds. It's mostly me, coffee, a couple of friends, and the eternal question of whether this actually matters or if I'm just avoiding the hard problems. I tell myself I'm building something my kids might care about someday. Really, I'm just trying to write code that doesn't make me feel dead inside.

The truth about programming nobody tells you: most of it is reading mistakes and trying not to repeat them. The rest is looking up for error messages and pretending you knew the answer all along. But occasionally, just occasionally, you build something that works exactly how you imagined it. Those moments keep you going through all the broken builds and impossible deadlines.

Still here. Still typing. Still wondering if that variable name makes sense or if I'm just too tired to care anymore.