2024.10.02 Wed 03:46 Wrath of Programmer

I just took a cold shower after running in place [1] for 2h while
watching Wrath of Man with Jason Statham [2].  And yes, it's middle of
the night.  The day before my tooth hurt like never before and I took
painkillers which made me sleepy so I slept most of the day.

	The pain will leave when it's done teaching you.
	- Bruce Lee

But let's talk about the movie.

Forget the main plot.  It's just a shallow action movie about revenge
with a plot twist that main protagonist is actually the big boss of a
mafia.  The bad guys are more interesting.  Around 1h into the movie
the origin story of our antagonists is reviled, with their motives for
going "bad".  Nowadays it's not enough to have someone who is greedy,
aggressive or simply evil for a sake of being evil.  So in this movie
the group of ex-military soldiers are bored.  They are retired for
some time, watching TV all day doing nothing and it kills them inside.
They want to get back into action so they started doing some heists.
It's clearly shown that the stolen money is not a priority, at least
not to the most of them.  There is a bad guy within then bad guys but
that's not important.

	Because the only thing talent wants is to be used.
	- Stepehn King "Dark Tower 7" [3]

Unfortunately later they do the biggest heist for the crazy amount of
money so they don't have to work anymore.  For me this kills the main
motivation that was originally introduced.

      Whenever somebody says they're doing one last job, that usually
      means their heart's not in it.  Probably never was.
      - The Ghoul "Fallout (American TV series)" [4]

Anyway, this got me thinking about programming.  How often people get
into this profession and it's difficult and demanding when you do it
for yourself but when you get the real job tasks are simple and boring
yet tedious, there are tones of them within a big and messy systems.
It's kills you inside often making people forget about the programming
itself, making such job only about paycheck.  For the true hacker this
is a nightmare situation.  Your potential is wasted.  Many got into
coding just for the money so it's fine for them, but also those people
get scarred whenever there are layoffs.  Hackers don't.

So what one should do to avoid becoming a bad guy in such situation?
You can turn even the most dull task into a challenge.  One easy way
is to add arbitrary time constrain.  Just for yourself without telling
anyone.  Another idea is to try do a big change in code right on first
try without any assistance from compiler or LSP [5].  With the right
mindset you can easily turn boring task into something difficult, no
need to wait for perfect job that will fulfill desires of your talent.

	Don't seek to have events happen as you wish, but wish them to
	happen as they do happen, and all will be well with you.
	- Epictetus

But now I'm afraid it is time for me to go kids.  Some developer is
trying to reduce complexity by adding more dependencies.

[1] See my older phlog entry: Watching movie while running in place
[2] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrath_of_Man
[3] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Tower_(series)
[4] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout_(American_TV_series)
[5] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Server_Protocol

EOF