Remainder of Seven Divided by Four

13 Jun 2007

Imagine this in your mind. Some really loud guitar, playing a sweet, sweet, rocking rhythm. Now bob your head back and forth; do a little head banging.

That’s my day. You see, we’re finaling at work.

What is finaling you ask? It is the process of folding time back into itself. Thickening and slowing it down like a cooling pot of caramel that is soon to become fudge. It is like the watermelon from Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension; abstract and curious.

If you were someone possessing religion, you could consider finaling a time of miracles. For truly, it is a time during which miraculous things happen (or as I have seen, it is when they let the big dogs (systems/low level/pure programmers) eat).

Most of the team is fixing bugs in the game. That is their focus. It is their purpose in life. Their reason for existing. They have giant fly swatters and use them with a reckless zealousness unknown to the world at large. I was one of them once. It seems years ago.

Then there are the rest. The last. The remainder of seven divided by four. I am one of the remainder of seven divided by four. You could call us R0S/4, SWAT, The Cleaners, The Closers; you could call us lots of things, good things and truly derogatory things.

You see, in addition to doing everything that isn’t a bug to make our product actually work and be shippable; we also fix whatever other people can’t fix. So when, we’ll just call him “Jack”, stops by to say hi; what “Jack” is actually doing is stopping to say “Hey. Did you see Bug XXXX that I forwarded to you? Yeah, I looked into it for a couple of days and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I tried to push it off on all of the other programmers and they all said a very exclamatory no. Since you aren’t allowed to say no, I’m giving it to you. Have a nice day.”

Then you see what we do, those of us in the R0S/4, is we fix it. Like last week, just some random decaffeinated morning, I made the game run twice as fast. I just sat down at my desk that day and said to myself “I want to go fast.” in a very Ricky Bobby way. So I did. I pulled the average sim time from 21ms to 10ms. I did it before lunch. People both love and hate you for doing things like that. You see you get some people who go “Yes! The game finally runs fast” and you get others who say “Well damn! I’ve been working on making the game fast for the last month with three other people… I hate you.”

So how does it all work? It’s simple really. There is a single principle at work here. For some people, stress is a killer. Stress is like a parachute behind your car as you’re trying to break a land speed record. For other people, stress is like rocket fuel. I fall into the latter category.

And while it all happens. All of the crazy little things. I bob along in my own little groove. Listening to the guitar in my head. Coding to my own beat. I don’t think everyone has that groove zone. That’s probably why they all get stressed out and go insane.

Athlete’s talk about the zone. The zone is alive and well in all things that one can do. From reading, to writing, to arithmetic. From jumping off cliffs, to running, to sleep. The only zone I can hit with any amount of relative ease is the coding zone. It’s the place where everything slows down and all of the hard things become easy. Thought and action become one and the same.

At times like this code can truly be seen as the art that it is. A gifted painter can touch the canvas with the brush and it all jumps to life, while the average artist, only able to make stick men, can cover the canvas in paint ten times over and it still won’t work, and when it does, you can see the evil of bloat radiating from it.

The part that really sucks though, is when you miss date night because you have to work :(