bironran

A long time ago, in my 20's, I found out it's easy for me to think in two streams as long as they operated in different languages. I could talk to my colleagues in Hebrew and answer emails in English at the same time.

Surprisingly, writing and speaking in the same language is not as easy for me. Possible, but requires some mental effort to keep the buffers separated.

Sure, it comes with its own issues like large stacks (10k copy of nearly the same stack?) and I predict a memory coloring in the future (stack variables or even whole frames that can opt out from being copied across virtual threads).

I accepted that I won't be a "name". Yet I have made suggestions that were adopted into Spring, I have commented on JCPs, I have talked with antirez (though not much contributed there, I'm still in awe of Redis' internal design). I just... don't care much about other people knowing me beyond what I need to pay the bills and make my immediate peers, manager chain and customers happy.

But the no presence... I've got a kid, a house, a mortgage. I've been in software since I was a teenager. Am I still fascinated by it? Sure. Will I still spend hours and hours of free time? Nop. It long since stopped being a hobby. Right now I like reading and listening to audio books, when I have a break from house chores and child rearing. I like to cook and experiment in the kitchen. The endorphin feedback cycle is so much faster (hours) than large scale software (weeks to years). I like to watch interesting shows on TV. Write. Coding-wise, I'm invisible outside the company I work at.

Not strictly a 9-5, but with a kid I do try to have quality family time, so I condense as much as possible to my working day, leaving time to be with my loved ones. If there's something important I'll participate. If there's a pagerduty alarm I'll jump. But otherwise, I'll deal with it tomorrow. I've long since learned to identify real emergencies from artificial urgency "because there's a milestone deadline!". Sure there is. Like the old saying goes "I love deadlines. I love the wooshing sound they make when they go by". Is it a customer commitment? No? Then I'll work on it Monday morning, right now I'm out.

I value people like that. Being a hero is a young-people game. You can't be a hero for years and years and not burn out. I've seen that happen. Working every weekend? Then something is wrong with the estimation. Or the design. Or whoever is in charge of priorities.

God helps me when I look for a job again. I guess I'll have to rely on references and hope to hell I'll pass the filtering software to actually get someone to look at my application. So far I've been lucky. Last time I actually sent CVs was at the beginning of my career, as a new grad, 20 years ago. Ever since then I was picked out, carried over, invited in by people who knew me. Really, really hoping that'll keep being the case.