I woke up this morning with a fire in my heart and my fingers spasming. I rushed to the computer, slammed my password in only to remember that my stock-laptop keyboard’s “Space” and “T” key were funked. I jumped to my bed next to which was my external keyboard and restarted my furious typing.

12 hours earlier…

I was working on a bug on a project 6 hours after work “ends”. On a Friday night, in the middle of quarintine. On a non-essential piece of work that I myself created.

And I was furious that such a bug could exist and after discovering the issue I claimed deity status and condemned the makers of the framework to deeps of the Hades for introducing such a stupid and poorly documented change.

Back to now

As I was passionately professing the many faults of the framework, half-way through this delicious diatribe I stopped.

I reread what I had written.

“Fuck”

I was wrong. I realized that my order of operations with how I handled the issue wasn’t the same as how I teach or how I would tell any engineer to handle it. I skimped out on my own system becauase I wanted to take a shortcut.

Sometimes I forget, or worse, refuse to use systems that I’ve made to keep myself organized and the things that I do streamlined.

Writing is one of those things. My writing exists in the format of lists, journals, and random thoughts. Organized in series of nested folders, and depending on how far back you go - hundreds of tiny notebooks.

I initially started my system to organize myself and better remember my life. But it had another effect as well. Since I’m a god-awful writer, I constantly reread everything that I write. This slightly improves my writing, but more importantly, it forces me to confront and reassess my thoughts.

Sure I could do that on the fly, but taking the time to write a piece to yourself seems like the low risk & high reward bargain which is rare in life.