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💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › phlog › the-spirtual-side-of-computin… captured on 2023-01-29 at 16:07:16.

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The spiritual side of computing
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A little while ago, in replying to a toot by SDFer Shufei, I
mentioned, a little reluctantly, that I felt like since I switched
from using NetBSD as my everyday operating system to some flavour of
Linux, "I feel like - for genuine want of a better term - the
spiritual side of my computing experience has suffered for it". I was
very happy when she replied "I am flatly unironical and enthusiastic
about the spiritual dimensions of computing. So I grok what you mean.
It’s like gopher to web". I still don't quite feel comfortable using
"spiritual" like this, but that's just a personal hang-up (just like
how in my recent tree-climbing post[1] I felt like I understood and
would have shared Charlie Cunningham's feelings about that adventure
but would never have described them that way). I've decided I am
ready to really embrace the concept, though.

Somewhere amongst all the things Grant Petersen has written which I've
read, he says something really, really wonderful about how when you
are choosing tools that you are going to use for work, the efficiency
of that tool is really important, but when you are choosing tools that
you are going to use for fun, efficiency is totally unimportant and
it's absolutely okay and actually vital to choose the tools that make
you happy. In my mind, this idea is expressed fantastically in
whatever Grant wrote. Tomasino wrote something (about spinning wool?
About playing the flute?) sometime in the last six months (I couldn't
find it just now and it makes me sad, although it's kind of fitting)
which made me really want to post the quote from Grant in response,
but when I went hunting I couldn't find *that* either. I found
something in "Just Ride" which was close, but didn't seem as good as I
remembered. I dunno if I've just failed to re-find the original
quote, or if I just remember it as being better than it was, but it
resonated with me and has also helped me to make this realisation.

Even though I really enjoying programming and sysadminning and have
spent a lot of time and energy in my life doing both, I have decided
that I am really lucky and really happy that I have never been a
professional sysadmin and have only very briefly been a professional
programmer.

We usually think of professionals as being more knowledgable and more
experienced than amateurs, in computing and any other field. And in a
lot of ways, that's true. But it's also true that professionals are
very rarely afforded the privilege of being able to experience, or to
openly admit to experiencing, anyway, the spiritual side of the their
work. At the very least, they have to "put those feelings aside" and
make Sensible Decisions at work all day. It's true many professionals
have personal projects they work on in their spare time because they
love what they do. But I think that "fun work" is inevitably and
sometimes significantly influenced by attitudes and opinions and
skill sets formed while operating in "work work" mode.

When you're a Serious Programmer, working in the Real World, you have
no choice but to care a lot about keeping up with trends (technical
trends and marketing trends) and worrying about scalabilty (often to
"inhuman scale") and constantly trying to drive down costs. All of
these factors absolutely have to matter more than silly things like
whether or not something is elegant, or traditional, or appealingly
minimalistic, or environmentally friendly, or has a cute logo or fun
release songs. You need to manage "cattle, not pets".

I'm so glad I've never once had to do these things!

Screw that whole scene, my computers *are* my pets, and I like it that
way and nobody can make me change.

I still don't really know what a kubernete is and I DON'T CARE!

I don't need to and I shouldn't feel bad about not keeping up with the
latest trends in the industry because I'm not *in* the industry so it
straight up doesn't matter to me. I can compute in whatever manner
makes me happiest and it doesn't matter one iota whether or not it's
inefficient or whether or not it scales. I can make decisions on
entirely ideological grounds, or even *purely whimsical* grounds and
it's okay.

It's amazingly cathartic to realise and fully embrace this.

[1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/world-class-tree-climbing.txt