#24 Being illegal makes you enjoy programming

It is quite true that when you take some time off the person or thing you thought you enjoy, and when you come back to it, you come to augment whatever feelings you have for that object. That is usually the time when you know you are truly meant for that person or thing.

Remember the time you both had a crush on each other in college? You guys took a summer off, each doing your own thing and barely keeping in contact. You rarely thought of each other. After you came back from the summer, however, things started to pick up. Conversations just flowed, and you seemed to have a new perspective of each other. Things picked up exactly where they left off. In fact, your good feelings probably accentuated since the time you left each other. That’s when you know you do like the other person.

I am pointing this out because that’s my relationship with programming.

I always thought I enjoyed programming because it is fun and exciting. But I told myself perhaps that’s also because it’s my job and subconsciously I forced myself to like it. It is also an easy job: I have flexible hours; I have no fixed lunch breaks; it pays well, and I get to solve challenging and difficult problems.

Yet despite these benefits I always thought I had no choice. I wanted to be a writer when I was a kid. Fourth grade I was supposed to represent my city (Changle) in the Fujian provincial writing competition (which my cousin, whom I have always thought to be smarter than me, took second place, if as vicariously for me, two years after I left China). In college I could have been a doctor or a lawyer or a PhD, but I had no choice because studying computer science is the only path that would make the most sense for an undocumented person like me. My vision was that when I graduated, even if I were undocumented, I could work part-time in the restaurant and still do some freelance web development on the side. In other words, I chose computer science out of necessity.

I am very lucky that necessity turned into a passion. The whole week I was on vacation, I did not write a single line of code. I took people to Bellevue, I went to West Seattle and ate at Bakery Nouveau, I took people to the airport and picked up people from the airport. I went on a food tour, an underground tour; I went to San Francisco and visited the YouTube campus. I enjoyed my time. Honestly I wasn’t even sure when I came back I would still remember how to code, because it felt like forever since I thought like an engineer (even though it’s only a week).

This week I came back to work. Before I left I signed up for about the same amount of work I usually do in a release, except this time I took a week off in a 3-week release cycle – some deeming optional and I would only get to it when I had time. This past week in essence I was cramming two weeks of work into one.

Every day, however, turned out to be a bliss. I finished everything I had to finish; including the optional features. Today we finished our last set of bugs and stabilized our website for tomorrow’s release. My manager just sent out an email saying everything is looking really good in his final testing. It seemed to be a very smooth release.

Looking back these couple weeks, my most relaxed and comfortable moments are the times I’m working. Why is that? Shouldn’t I have enjoyed my vacation more?

I would compare programming to a type of intellectual jogging. It is hard in the beginning, but it builds up over time. You get addicted to it. It is not the typing code onto the computer itself that matters so much, it’s the creativity, determination, and the process it takes to get to a solution to an engineering problem, in much the same way that jogging isn’t about using your legs, that’s only part of it; it’s about the psychology of forcing yourself to push a little bit further and strengthening your will power that you crave for.

At the end of it I always felt like I had a fantastic workout. I would have so much adrenaline that I solved a problem. I felt like I have done something for that day.

The most beautiful part about programming for me is I worked through a problem. That excitement could not be found anywhere else but the time I was studying for Math Olympiad in high school. I loved that time. I wasn’t the smartest person on Art of Problem Solving, but I felt like I was one of the elite, and I was solving math problems most people don’t think about. Same thing with programming. It felt like I just went on an intellectual journey of some sort. And I always came out delighted, excited, and somehow enlightened.

This vacation taught me I actually do enjoy my work. Although my vacation was fun I felt my life was so empty. Programming gave me a meaning in life. I crave for that 3-4 hours of uninterrupted time of concentrated thinking and coding in the afternoon. I love the feelings that all the code in the screen folded into a story line, and then things just made sense, and how I would start typing and when I stopped typing, compiled, and it just worked. It took me a couple years to get here, but that felt good.

I would advise to find out if you truly enjoy your current partner, your current job, or your current whatever, take some time off each other. Then come back to it, if you continue to like each other, then you have probably found the right person.