A Farewell to Code
10,000 hours for twenty dollars a month
There’s a chemical in your brain that makes you dread doing your taxes. Mine is amplified tenfold—call it bitaracitate. It’s debilitating around the wrong task and narcotic around the right one.
When it finds something it likes, it doesn’t let go.
For me, the opposite of taxes was coding.
I looked forward to unsealing my laptop every morning and summoning a code editor, like I looked forward to the morning’s first coffee. Together? Bliss.
You need not be a coder to understand: think of a time you published a blog post. Created a presentation. Completed a long form you’ve been putting off. The charge you got from that was enough to power your entire day. Three or four hours of this stuff and you felt like a god.
What was it about coding specifically?
It was the music of mentation. The percussion of keys as your fingers glided across the keyboard. The symphony of tension when a thing didn’t work, and the resolution when you thought your way through.
And the stakes. The way lines of code could be tracked to a spike in revenue. The satisfaction of making systems that instantly benefited thousands of users when deployed.
No craft moved faster from farm to table.
Today, the craft is unrecognizable.