Rowan started writing Why Programming Still Sucks in Februari of 2021, to channel his frustrations from the software development job that he was trying to reintegrate in. That job was more frustrating than what he remembered from before he got into the hospital.
Something had happened to him those few days in the hospital. And that something made it very hard to convince himself any longer that: sure, this wasn't his dream job, but at least it was flexible and allowed him time to persue other interests … in theory. This sucked! Programming sucked, and, really, he had known this for a pretty long time. Didn't he promise himself in 2007 to never get back into IT?
He had gotten back into IT temporarily after his bachelor in marine biology. Half a year had turned into a year. A year had turned into another year. Before he knew it, six years had passed—six years that he hardly noticed while running on the exhaust fumes of his stress system.
His girlfriend had grown tired of “somebody who is so stuck in his life”. It was not the first time that she broke up with him. But somehow, this never really got through to him before, and they had contintued to live together and … do couple things together. He was too busy to deal with a breakup anyway.
After almost a year of corona lockdowns, she lost her patience. While she started searching online for other guys to have sex with, something started to really cramp up inside of Rowan's belly. Stress? Probably.
Eventually, when she was about to meet with one of her online flirts in real life (planning to have sex), he tried to address his angst by screaming, staring, whining and even banging his fists on the floor. It didn't help. All it did was prompt her to leave him just as his cramps were increasing in intensity. She was sleeping at his sister's place, away from his emotional breakdown, when he was finally overwhelmed by the physical pain. Crying and muttering to himself, he dragged himself to the hospital, got his appendix removed and had to stay a couple of days until the intravenous antibiotics had calmed down the imflammation of the adjacent peritoneum.
But, that was not what really happened. Nor was the realest thing that his girlfriend of 6 years (officially 5) broke contact with him minutes before he was wheeled into the OR.
The happening that made it so difficult to get back into programming was the support he got from his friends and family while he was in the hospital. Sure, he had decided to continue to live even if she no longer wanted him. But, he still felt completely unworthy. And his highest priority was to become more worthy of his previous princess again. Yet, his family and friends kept saying to him things like: “You're such a loving, sweet, caring person. You deserve somebody who really wants you and gives you the love you deserve.
Deserve? What did a worthless person like him deserve anyways? Something was wrong here. Why did they all keep pressing him on his value as a person while there was this gaping wound in his chest telling him the opposite? This festering scab had been mercilessly removed from his wound of worthless. And now all that love and support poured right into his open wound. Maybe he did have some worth, besides sacrificing himself for his object of worship and his dreadful programming job.
And thus he become aware of what he did and did not want. The life he had lived was not the life he wanted. He had lived it for her. He had lived it for his colleagues. He had lived it for his boss. He had lived it for that one fantastic customer.
Why Programming Still Sucks was started almost accidentally. He intended to finish another book first, to process the trauma that had informed (and was deepened by) his relationship with Her. But, no such luck. He now knew with full clarity that this book too needed writing. How else was he going to process the nastiness of sitting behind a screen solving problems that he didn't want to solve? Why did nobody else see that these programming problems ought not to even exist anymore? Now increasingly in touch with his likes and disliked, he could no longer ignore the pain of programming. It had to be penned down.
During the quest of persisting in programming while telling this tale from the shadows of IT, he found a new love—a goddess no less. She gifted him the confidence that was still lacking, showed him himself through her eyes. The magic fairy dust carried them together through cold streams and currents, between the ferns, into a waterfall and through the rainbow. Alive!
The vacation days he had used to live his magical adventures with his river nymph had annoyed his employer. In response, they offered him a promotion: more responsibility, more commitment to a bleak career in a bleak IT landscape. He declined and quit—sort of got fired actually.
Now free, he finished the tale. He had always intended there to be light in the tale: angels would come to the rescue. But how to write about angels and free association when you're bound by your paychecks? Still without a “home”—he had left the city apartment to Her—, he had plenty of places to stay, with people who loved him. And doing this for months had allowed him to safe some money. That, plus a severance pay¸ made it so that he could finish this tale without the immediate stressors of survival. He was free. He had found the love of his life. Now he just needed to pen down how he thought that angels were going to save the world.
An idea that he had had since he was 18 was now at last ready to be released, off of his shoulders, into your hands.