The last time I just flipped out and wrote some code at full intensity was at a programming contest two and a half years ago, in my senior year at college. The last time before that was at a job in the summer between sophomore and junior year, connecting up some LabVIEW diagrams. The last time before that was in my first semester, freshman year, when I made a chess engine in a weekend for some class I was taking. Then the last time before that was in 11th grade when I told somebody I could make a tetris game in a day and proceeded to do so in QBASIC. The last time before that was when I made a fancy spreadsheet in Microsoft Works ’99 to manage an NCAA basketball pool I was running in eighth grade. That was the first program I wrote, and there are no more instances of intense concentration before that, that involved programming.
I didn’t know as much about programming then, and yet somehow I feel that I had more energy to just get stuff done, to just get code down on the computer, to quickly and nonchalantly look up documentation without making a big deal about it, to just care about getting something up and working.
I’m going to devote this weekend to the art of flipping out and getting some code done. Sorry about posting late today. I’m sure the last six hours were miserable for you.