April 5, 2013 — Opeyemi O
April 5, 2013 — Opeyemi O
70 cl of coke and 3 hours later, I woke up in a hotel from a dream with all I could remember being trying to dodge a client. I had slept on the code. The first thing I did was to pick up my laptop, and continue from where I stopped; Windows Media playing songs from my library in shuffle mode.
This is my life — except the coke and hotels. Those don’t happen every day. Power has been out on my street for three days; the inverter died last night. As there is no generator in the house (damn, I hate generators) and there was work to do, there had to be a work around.
I don’t have a “real” job. I don’t jump out of bed rushing to shower so I can beat the traffic to work. It’s not as interesting as it sounds. You spend long hours trying to put together long gibberish. Then it gets broken because you miss one full-stop somewhere and you spend even longer hours trying to find where that is missing. Some days you don’t even see the sunshine because you are so “locked in”. You feel out of place socially. Many things that interest other people just seem weird.
And not even the money part. There are the high points with real lows. You don’t know when the next pay is. You wait. You believe. And there are the arguments over things as minor as a 40px width difference, the color of a button and why its label should be ‘Login’ not ‘Log In’.
But it’s the little things — joy when you get notified a customer has paid for your product, wonder that out of weird characters can come something beautiful and useful, that you can earn recognition for this in the continent; even win awards. However, most importantly, it is that joy of creativity. Finding peace and satisfaction in what you do; enjoying it.
I just had lunch with my co-founder, the other has left for Lagos. I can only hope there will be power later tonight. Guess I’ll finally pick up that novel the girlfriend dropped on her last visit or practice some tunes on my guitar.
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About Opeyemi: I am the lead developer for www.prowork.me. I still try to imagine what it would have been if it was not computer programming but I am quite certain it would revolve round arts and creativity. And discovering that other part of me is what I do, when I’m not coding.