Of Cooking and How I ended up loving Programming

Not my kitchen, but close….

Something just blew up in my kitchen.

There’s smoke and the distinct smell of burning meat but here I am writing a blog post about it… Priorities Yayyyyy!!!!

Ok, honestly, that was a few hours ago and I’ve spent quite some time cleaning up the mess but what struck me was a stark realization — I’m a terrible chef. Just Kidding, I’m an incredible chef, once every two months or so, but I digress.

Even as the smoke was filling up the room, even as I was turning off all the electrical switches and getting the gas cylinder as far away from the mayhem as possible, I realized something, I was having fun.

You see, I’ve been on a bit of a break from work and was simply taking a breather alternating between long stares at my phone and churning code. And yet here I found myself in the middle of the kitchen trying to stop Lucifer from exiting hell through the gas burner. It struck me at that point… I love it.

Not the prevention of an escape from hell, but the experimentation. The application of multiple variables to create the unexpected. And I enjoy it — almost as much as I enjoy something else- building stuff with code.

I think that’s why I love programming so much. It fills that adventurer’s hole within me. That need to pick a ship and sail to the wild unknown. That feeling of wild abandon as one stares down the unforgiving abyss. That feeling of an unrolling mystery. Through the smoke in my kitchen, the answer was so clear

There’s a pleasure to experimentation, to throwing out the rule book, or ripping out a few pages and sticking in your own. Trying your recipe and watching it fail only to clean up and start again, tweak one more item, change one thing and fire up the engines. Building as you move along. The spontaneity of it is addictive, everything is up in the air and you just want to see how it all lands. Its in the tearing apart of established norm, or the deconstruction of the assumed.

And what field better provides an environment for this kind of mayhem than computers. You can build entire projects and tear them down. You can try new ideas, watch them fail, try again, tweak and try again. There’s a beauty to it. It’s the creation of a symphony with instruments you’ve never heard before. And the goal is simple, a harmony, a work of art, from the bits and pieces of melody that you can put together. And the beauty is having the balls the know when it fails and to have even bigger balls to pick up and start again, trying anew, afresh.

Looking back, this is what drew me in in the first place. The ability to push the boundaries, to try new approaches, to fail fast and hard and get back up faster and harder. The need to build new things. To try and try again. And I love it!!!

So now I leave my kitchen for my keyboard, to go back to something I love to do so much… Tearing down the castle, to build it up again.

#Beyourself #Cooking