2015/12/31

Backward

I wrote this as my original reflection, and it was a good examination of my past so I could leave it behind. I decided to write something lighter and more forward-looking. “Write one to throw away”, I suppose :D

20XX

I have tried to (re)start a blog for about ten years now, and I’m always trapped by the need to explain the framework I’m coming from in words I’m never quite equipped or comfortable with. Yet despite my better judgement, I feel incredibly unsatisfied starting new web presences in a vacuum for reasons that are probably not actually justiable or even well-developed.

But it’s a new year, so let’s try once again, as we do every couple of years. :-D

2015 / 32

2015 was a very good year for me. Unemployed for three months, I began by stumbling into a completed basic prototype of a roguelike that got me comfortable with Clojure, Functional and Functional Reactive Programming, even if I was misusing the concepts a bit in my naivette.

I had my latest Silicon-Valley style interview, in which I’m reminded that I’m not a “killing it” kind of developer, and frankly pretty damn slow compared to many of my peers. But while prepping stressed me out to a point I feel no person ought to feel obligated to stress out for in order to determine one’s livelihood … I had fun. I felt that I given it my best, and I felt a desparate enjoyment of the algorithm problems I was bashing my head against, and I didn’t give a hoot that my best was honestly not good enough. I had made my peace with being mundane and ice-bound.

I started a local Toronto job, recommended by someone I knew and cared about before working there, and already filled with people I knew and cared about before working there. From a tech stack point of view we’re pretty unfashionable (and what little ego I have remaining sometimes throbs at my new PHP life) but that tech maturity was matched by a social and organizational maturity that I now hold dearer than any framework. Since moving to Toronto, I was one of the youngest developers on the team, and my elders show their wisdom very well. I had always suspected it, but the awareness of working in the analytics field (ultimately, a field of optimizing monetary extraction from customers) had burrowed a cognitive dissonance in my mind that always weighed a bit heavy. I now work, ultimately, for retail systems. And while software development is always a few optimizations a way from a dehumanizing form of capitalism, I currently exist to make retail staff happier, and to enable customers to part ways with their money for something they at least want and appreciate (whether it be designer fashions or whether it be kitty litter.) I work in a place where every day is not a struggle to survive. I work in a place where people have families they want to go home to in the evening. I work in a place that, after our heroics, we are congratulated and asked to decelerate back to a sustainable and healthy velocity of professionalism. I can’t fling about a lot of buzzwords about my current job. But I can say that, for the first time since moving to Toronto, I am genuinely at peace and supportive of my environment, my circumstances, the vision, and its ramifications.

I saw two of the bands that most shaped my life, Autechre and King Crimson. Both were stained by an apparently consistent Toronto penchant for being a disrespectful audience, but in both concerts I was allowed to embrace in person two creators that I have clutched onto in difficult times, two musics which have spoken to very tender parts of me in ways I cannot ever dream of sharing with anyone who doesn’t feel that way too. And live, both bands present a completely different dimenson to their work – a living essence – which has reshaped how I think about the studio records within my musical coffers.

I – accidentally, I suspect – wound up moderating a few communities because someone felt I was the best equipped person to do so. All of the empathy, intersectionality, and kindness I have been trying to foster while competely disengaged from any community is finally proving itself, and while I am not proving perfect I am finding myself deeply enjoying the communities of kindness and discourse that I am blessedly well equipped to help foster.

2015 was a year of peace and a year of safety, and it’s the first year in which I have not felt trapped by the past, a past of which this is the perfect time to recede back into for a retelling :D

2010 / 2012

I have talked about it on so many mediums that I am tired of explaining my narrative over and over, but let us do it again because I have trapped myself inside the narrative for so long.

• I did not graduate with a Computer Science degree easily; I was slow to understand concepts, I do not grasp math well, and I was very sensitive about this as I tried to outdo myself in atonement for it.
• I had always wound up in counter-cultural social circles for reasons I didn’t understand as an oblivious nice little Indian boy, but I had again wound up in those circles by the time I graduated and stayed there for my early professional life.
• Both out of shame and a genuine dissatisfaction with the (prevalent though not universal) closemindedness and misogyny of computer science student society, I brashly and miraciously managed to seek out and involve myself in Waterloo’s art scenes.
• After five years of voracious and prolific LiveJournal blogging in which I had a driven and self-challenging voice that people enjoyed (even if it’s kind of embarassing now to read), in 2009 that voice collapsed and I simply could not find a reason to ever contribute any form of written word for public consumption.
• While that prolific LiveJournal passion burned, I had met some really interesting people who deeply fostered my musical, literary, and other cultural development, with bonds often forming around computer scientists who wanted to be more than just the “revenge of the nerd” narrative they saw in school.¹
• I moved, with some misgivings, to a Toronto from a Kitchener I loved but had outgrown.
• I entered the startup culture the dominates downtown Toronto software development, and found myself ill-equipped to maintain the personal brand, entrepeneurship and bravado it demands.
• I exhausted myself trying – and ultimately failing – to develop a “personal brand” and social capital it felt like a twenty-something needed to be more than an anonymous mook. At the end of the day, I like learning stuff and I like making challenging things, and I don’t really care how novel I appear, how marketable I seem, how useful I am, or how I impresses others.
• I struggled with, and ultimately failed to save, the relationship that brought me to Toronto as it morphed into something I couldn’t handle. As a software developer and a straight dude, I had enough empathy to navigate a relationship going well but not enough to help people going through their rough transitional years. I also learned that the relatioship patterns an expectations my parents and mainstream culture had set out were not just not appropriate for the people I tend to immerse myself in, but kind of suck if you don’t buy into (and don’t relaly understand) a huge part of mainstream culture.
• In that relationship breakdown, I was made painfully aware that I am an immigrant (I don’t want to talk about my internalized racism growing up here, but I definitely had it even up to university) and that there would always be a gap between me and the implied whiteness of the middle-class Toronto society I wanted to fit into. (I was very westernized as a child, even in India, but that just isn’t enough here to pave over the gaps in culture I always stumble across.)

1983

I was born, prematurely, in the Goan city of Panaji, to be born within the support network of my maternal extended family. I returned to my family home of 10 years, Al-Dammam in Saudi Arabia, where I would spend the early formative years of my life.

2010 was a weird time where the power I felt via writing to grow into new forms of myself had abruptly collapsed for no reason. From then and until the end of 2014, life was a mixture of very concrete upheavals (relocations, a very nasty breakup, and yearly layoffs) to some very abstract dissatisfactions:

1. I have been accused of being insufficiently human and I feel that’s very related to being a heavy introvert, unable to process emotinos effectively, and an immigrant.
2. I am clearly not looking for glory the way almost any vivacious personality I find on the internet and in social circles, therefore I don’t know what my purpose for doing anything is if I’m not going to use it in a public way.
3. Toronto is a hard place for a non-sociable person to make new friends if you don’t have a stable of them to begin with, or want to expand past your existing one.
4. I know layoffs are supposed to be a fact of life in a startup world, but frankly they are traumas that have shaped the way I look at my own survival, and I am not happy with a world that finds them normal.

So in short, my time in Toronto has fucking sucked, and I lost my sense of personhood for at least four years. This isn’t Toronto’s fault, there is much I love about this city and many people I love within this city and I will hold onto them as dearly as I am able to. But that’s been the current era of my life for so long, and I’m so happy to be moving on from it.

2013

Twitter is a really hard thing for me to explain. I don’t know why I started into it given Facebook or my eventual falling away from LiveJournal. I had an account for many years and didn’t do anything with it. But one day I did. Perhaps because writing pages had become so intimidating for me, as had paragraphs. Even a single paragarph filled me with a paralyzing fear of past writing I didn’t want to continue doing but that I couldn’t just pretend didn’t exist² It’s embarassing how much cognitive tension I have wanting to distance myself from my past but also not knowing how to start a new persona/tone/presence without explaining everything via my past. I assume skilled writers find this eye-rollingly obvious to do.

In any case, for reasons and a narrative that I’m purposely glossing over, writing 140 blurbs was a small and safe way to communicate my sad-sack-ness in a way that was easily shouted over by the void, and I’m sure most of what I say will always be embarassing to future me. Along the way I’ve played with identity and managed to strip whatever dignity in voice I thought I needed, and I’ve found it fun (and accidentally rewarding) (and accidentally engaging to a tiny population of twitter and facebook users that’s still larger than my Livejournal friend count), even as I attempt to communicate via mashing up programmer speak and musical/literary references, even as I talk about not being a human as a form of political rhetoric, even via expressing my self-power via a dungeons and dragons dungeon villain identity. Post-modern things like that, the kind that suggest I may one day read Zizek or Baudrillard.

Twitter allowed me to find my voice, and I’ve had it (unacknowledged) for much of 2015.

1991

The Gulf War convinces my parents that Saudi isn’t a place to raise children. India had been left for economic reasons, but my paternal family had all settled in a suburb of Toronto, Canada, so we moved there and I grew under the watchful eye of my paternal grandmother and the (far less rigorous and far more creative) Canadian school system.

Sometime in elementary school I went burrowing in the basement for interesting things, to find my dad’s naughty picture stash, undernearth of which was my dad’s science fiction stash (I remember Alan Dean Foster’s “Dark Star”, Clifford D. Simak and Isaac Asimov collections/curations very fondly.) Undernath that stash was a collection of compute science manuals for CP/M, pre-ANSI C, UNIX user commands, and a whole slew of other tools/languages which made no sense out of context but were really interesting to learn. I technically knew a variant of C for 5-10 years before I knew how to compile a damn program, because my dad wasn’t a good enough aspiring programmer to teach me how Turbo C or Microsoft Visual C++ worked (or that I needed to adopt a slightly different ANSI standard way of doing things.)

Despite being very equipped with software development materials, without context or guidance (Internet tutorials being very spotty) I basically stumbled my way around things and never quite had a handle of what was going on. I don’t have a great lineage of smarts going back in my family, we’re just a bunch of regular joes, and I am no exception.

2015

The last great projects I’ve worked on this last year have been: 1) A Clojurescript coffee review web-based application, in minimal-viable-product form. 2) A pretty succesful codification of a community that attempts to maximize the inclusive, intersectional, compassionate, and positive vibes we have at our best while removing the strife, disenfranchising, and exclusionary habits we have at our worst. 3) Implenting the basic functional-programming foldRight function in terms of foldLeft, and realizing that was a (very concrete) proof that filled me with a lot of intuition and awareness as to foldLeft/Right’s power to do anything over the content of a data collection. You don’t need to know what this means, but ultimately it means that somewhere within me a is a slow but sure aptitude for the computer science rigour I was ashamed to not have in school and that my peers will always be better at. But so what? I love learning this shit, and who cares how much I suck if I’m becoming more powerful at the skill I love every few moons?

In 2015 I have finally stopped caring about the impact I will have in this world. I was never a great student, I was never a great modern software developer … but in the grand scheme of things, I’m all right. And the Internet has places for schmuck non-humans like me. And real people do to. I’m tired of trying to disprove that or find ways to prove it.

2013

Being old³ is great. You stop caring about parties, or adventures, being attractive. You start caring about financial stabilities, a clean house, feeling calm and great when you come home, the purring of two cats who love you. I think I was always old, looking back. Youth always fit me poorly. Now I am in my element.

2016

I don’t have exciting expectations for 2016. I’m over that now. I have survived the last few years, and I have survived my life. What I want is more pleasant times and less crappy times. But I have a few goals I would like to see followed through, which may or may not follow from the above texts

1. I would like to become the kind of software developer who writes tools as he goes about his day. This includes modifying my Emacs and Shell configurations.
2. I would like to have a website. I would like to write long prose when it makes sense and long technical findings when it makes sense. I would like to not give a damn about whether my blog contributes in any significant way beyond being a collection of words I write.
3. Now that I am better able to articulate the dissatisfaction I have with modern software development industries (startup culture as promoting a new exploitive social class over enabling consumer tools, cloud computing designed to lock in customers rather than necessary enhance their lives, proprietary software once again relishing their control over users now that they’ve defeated and co-opted the never-really-viable-for-nonenthusiast-users threat of Linux and open source) I’d like to reorganize my computer life back into the open source fold now that I feel comfortable enough as a software developer to have a ‘write-everything-I-need disciple and perhaps even the empathy to make consumer alternatives.
4. I would like to take advantage of the social circles I find myself in despite myself. People around me have decided I’m worth something, and they’re usually people I enjoy in kind. Instead of worrying about my place amongst them, seeing as I’ve given up jocking for anything I would like to continue this newfound trend of enjoying people agian, especially as I’ve rewritten how I engage in this land I immigrated as a kid to for an ostensibly better life.
5. I would like to produce effects upon the reality and enjoy them for the processes that produced those effects (the journey was always more fun than the destination); I would like to continue not giving a damn about how my productions are recieved (and the tale can always be worked in later.)

I have other goals in mind, but they’re nerdy. And if I’m lucky, I’ll have the motivation to talk about them. I used to have a big obsession over having a different space for technical writing, personal writing, potential fiction writing and so on, maybe the easiest thing to do is not care and let emergent conviences sort themselves out as other people wish for them or I figure them out.

The easiest thing to start off with in 2016 is a website, a few domains based on my earth and true names, and a shrug as I press on.

Hi, 2016. :)

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