Paul Graham [who is obnoxiously elitist, but frequently insightful] has a new essay, “Holding a Program in One’s Head”, that is making me feel sad this morning.
(I’m fascinated by such spaces, as I’ve written before.) Currently my work is so fragmented into little bits — reading bug reports, figuring out what’s going wrong, making little tiny changes, testing them, dealing with the bureaucracy of integrating changes. It’s no one’s fault, and it’s a necessary part of finishing a large release, but I’m sick of it.
The worst thing is that I can’t even summon up the energy to focus deeply on anything else. When I’m not doing the above, I’m mostly sucking at the teat of incoming news-bites and emails. When all my unread counts hit zero I feel lost. I have any number of interesting in-progress projects I could work on, but I develop selective amnesia of them while at the keyboard, because I feel too lazy to put on those Goggles Of Omniscient Coding.
I know this will go away. But I want it to go away NOW.