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Glorious purpose?

An old story tells of three stonecutters who were asked what they were doing. The first replied, "I am making a living." The second kept on hammering while he said, "I am doing the best job of stonecutting in the entire country." The third one looked up with a visionary gleam in his eyes and said, "I am building a cathedral."

For long time I believed that my work as programmer is of utmost importance -- I was building the cathedral of Free Software (well, actually Bazaar), which would liberate people, at least people like me. That didn't happen. GitHub, Discord, Slack, Electron won, old school of Unix lost.

https://jany.st/post/2015-01-01-a-generation-lost-in-the-bazaar.html

These days my contribution to Free Software is ocassional patches to nixpkgs, trying to fix cross-compilation support and doing general QA -- documentation not installed, missing configuration options and so on. Even this feels like uphill battle -- portability to Darwin is clearly of higher priority. And for every fix I make somebody will do something horrible and idiot-friendly, like loading configuration from path relative to binary.

Now I am looking what I am *really* doing or was doing, which is cleaning shit after other people. My tools are sed, grep and python. I am WALL-E, always been WALL-E, but now without glorious purpose. Without any purpose. I'll go buy icecream.