A long long time ago… no wait the story starts like this:
When I was first employed full time as a developer the boss said we where looking for someone with an eye twitch because they are smart and left brain thinkers.
Luckily I had one after 12 years of freelancing dealing with C#,Java,ASP,PHP,AJAX,XML,SOAP,Javascript working on artificial intelligence, sifting through spaghetti code so deep and dark that neo from the matrix would beg for mercy. I started a career at a major company and followed the path to the dark side of I.T
Here are some warning signs when you go in too deep.
You start of nice and slow learning the basics, talking to people in the company and building business relationships because they are important right?
3 years later…
You eat scripts for breakfast and smoke a pack of javascript php and xml a day, people feed you through the door because your time is just too damn valuable to waste and they are also not sure anyone that white is allowed to go outside, no one else knows the voodoo that you conjure up when you embark on a journey of binary awesomeness.
You surf the net through 10 proxy servers with a toaster connected somewhere in between linked somehow to your own localhost where you are running 5 virtual machines with different forms of linux that god himself programmed just because you can. You go through 5 keyboards a day and no one without a linux security manual and standby binary decrypter can talk to you without using sign language or reverting to tribal signs and smoke signals.
You master the art of talking on the phone while hacking a CSS template for something you have never even seen the front end of and it works so well that the printer automatically prints you a have a nice day smiley face. You lose the ability to talk but it doesn’t matter because you bio wifi connect to everyone or at least you think it works. Your liver loses the need to metabolise coffee because this and vending machine chips became your primary food source and no logic can explain why this vampire looking creature talking in binary fuelled by coffee and script languages are still alive but no one cares because the cyber ninja makes them millions.
You don’t have to go to the bathroom anymore because you had to develop this ability half way through that 3 week debugging process where you are always 1sec away from discovering the solution but you just never get there.
Red hat linux 9 and a mysql book printed only half way because the writers where pretty sure no one would ever get to this part of the book is used as door stoppers because you already filled in the blank chapters and anything else the people who wrote the software didn’t even know.
You smoke a pack of 60 cigarettes without using your hands to even light them and no one questions this office smoking because java decedent from the heavens will have the sweet bread of binary rain on them. You have a fight with the main company investor and you don’t get in trouble because you are partially invisible after being sun deprived for so long and she didn’t understand any of your binary insults.
You and your machine can communicate without any cables, you have regular fights, you celebrate together when the compiler smiles at you and, you hug and kiss, you breakup and makeup. Your mouse stops working from overuse, friction and brain energy but you don’t care because you know all the windows shortcuts and you prefer your own operating system you programmed using your mobile phone anyways. You start calling your girlfriend a datatype and you pay with cache.
Once you reach this stage it is time to defrag your brain, switch off the machine (yes at the main) I know its difficult. Then pack your 1 t-shirt, leave the coffee and go on holiday!
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