It reads like a coming-of-age story for a software developer, without the part that comes next; crushing humility as flaunted self-assumed ideals are obliterated by the need to deliver actual results that real people actually pay for.
This is the reason I dropped out of my masters program. There isn't room for exploration and looking for beauty anymore. Everything is about production throughput.
Author here. Sorry for the quality of the text. It was flushed out in a brief moment of euphoria when a 0.1 feature list was complete. Never edited, never checked for Markdown bugs even. (Please come later)
MC Escher had a big impact on me growing up. I remember being a kid and looking at some of those famous lithographs and thinking, "oh jeez wow, ok, that's pretty cool".
Geez, could the writing breathe any more full-of-oneselfness?
Equating yourself to a generational genius because you are "an author of a math-rich RDX data format and the `librdx` library" has to be one of the funniest things I've read in a while
I do feel it's a bit excessively "this is very deep." But I don't think he's equating himself to Escher; I think he's just saying that Escher's work is a good metaphor for the kinds of thoughts he's engaging in right now-- for a shallow pass of much the same purposes that Hofstadter used Escher and Bach.
Agreed I think the criticism of this post is largely undeserved. This kind of thinking is an important stepping stone on any developers journey.
No idea what Mr. Escher would think of me, but I have his reflected self-portrait etched permanently on my forearm, behind which his metamorphosis snakes all the way up to my shoulder. I got my tattoos in my early 20s, as most probably do. My best friend's older sister lived next to us, and was an accomplished tattoo artist, and I allowed her to experiment in exchange for free work. She used diluted black ink to simulate the appearance of graphite, which worked wonderfully on MCE's self-portrait. I don't know that I'll get any more work, but here at 42-years old I don't have any regrets.
This reminds me of a story I read in an Escher biography: Escher would receive letters from mathematicians, saying that his work exactly visualized this or that theory. Escher himself did not understand what they were talking about, as he was not into mathematics. He did of course enjoy that others got so much out of his work.