Ryan and Delilah wrote my work package today. It’s disappointingly slim. I hope they don’t expect that little of me. If my confidence is anything reliable, I’ll have it all done by mid-June. I’m proud of my capacity for efficient work of high quality.
When abstractions go wrong, I’m the one to put them into perspective. When bugs are introduced, I’m the one to find and fix them. When I see code, I understand it. I can trace any behaviour through a codebase, even one I’ve never seen, faster than anyone I know. When I see an interesting feature in my daily life, sometimes I’ll see the requisite code and architecture in my mind.
What I have, I owe to mentors whom I used to call geniuses. I don’t believe in genius. The concept puts attainable things out of reach. If you say “impossible”, you forfeit any possibility of understanding what went into making that so-called genius.
I recall the mentors and role models who I pulled down from the cloud of ‘genius’. From a Twitch stream, I met “troymoder”, an open-source developer who leads the Scuffle project. It’s a video streaming platform written in Rust. At his day job, he works on AI systems for facial recognition. Makes a lot of money. Prefers NixOS. Never went through post-secondary education. Do you know what 7TV is? He was the lead developer and co-founder. Every serious Twitch user uses 7TV.
From another Twitch community, “MIS0_PHAT”, is a software engineer specializing in computer vision. Always has great advice as a software engineer just a few years ahead of me. Huge proponent of LLMs, initially to my dismay. I’ve been able to use LLMs better because of him, though. He’s a Waterloo grad who received a full-time offer from his internship in San Francisco. Also makes a lot of money at a company using AI for identity verification. He likes hot pot, bakes and cooks for a hobby, and loves bubble tea. In terms of personality, he’s amicable. An ordinary person from California. Fortunately, he’s not your stereotypical insufferable tech Californian. Like me, he sneers at the Silicon Valley rats who start blogs on things they don’t understand, especially philosophy, or psychology, and think themselves polymaths for having shower thoughts.
From a pen spinning community, “steven_saga/nine53”. I don’t know his full name. Came from nothing, takes a job working in construction to pay for his tuition. In terms of pen spinning, he’s considered a genius. But he practices a lot and holds himself to a very high standard. He’s also a pioneering theoretician who challenges the thoughts of the old guard of the community. Winner of World Cup 2022. Can you believe a pen can move like this? We talk about software engineering a lot. Neither of us spin competitively anymore, but I keep in touch with him because he keeps up with my pace of development as a software engineer. Used to use Arch, now pesters me to get on Fedora Silverblue.
At NAT, I met “Dekr0”, a computer engineering graduate from the UofA. He uses Arch too. He “fell out of love with tiling window managers” and only uses a single terminal, managing windows with tmux, and uses vim motions for everything, traits of Arch users not uncommon of power users late in their career. He’s only about 25 years old. He’s unemployed, lives in a cheap apartment close to the city center, and spends all day in his room working on open-source, especially in audio processing and video game modding. Eats while listening to talks on software engineering and design practices. Knows all the languages. In his free time, works through software development courses. Still hasn’t landed a gig. I’m not kidding. If I land a well-paying job before he does, I’ll feel survivor’s guilt.
At the same company, <I don’t know his username but I’m not putting his real name here.>. He runs servers in his basement, with a lot of virtual machines, runs entire IT departments and software solutions for companies, simultaneously, on his own. Very sociable. Incredible teacher. Makes his own beer, married, seldom stays at a job for more than 16 months. That’s his magic number.
There are more who I’ll avoid listing, because I’m not in the mood to flatter them today.
If you’re calling someone a genius, you admit that you do not hope to be their peer, and seal that possibility from yourself. If there are people I think of as geniuses, it’s because I don’t know them well enough.