Archis's Blog

I didn’t want to jinx it, but it’s true. We all need our intellectual highs from time to time – some find it in music, some find it in literature, and while I enjoy both of the former in large amounts, it turns out my inner-child craves programming.

My last few blogs have a very depressing tone to them – I do have problems keeping my emotions in control if I can’t find an outlet regularly, or if I can’t get my thrill for the day. I guess it’s like an addiction by now, but it’s also reality. My life has been downhill ever since October, when the crazy shipping pressures of PDC suddenly went away, and I was left to cope with a vacuum (the company thinks they do you a favour by giving you time off). Upto Jan I somehow mustered my internal forces to keep me in check, but in Feb, all hell broke loose.

I found spirituality, faith, religion and lots of other things in the process. Learnt some Yoga, learnt meditation. And they helped to some extent, but for some reason, “Don’t be ambitious” was too hard a pill to swallow. All these things ask us to not expect anything from life, in order to be peaceful.

Last weekend though, I realised that the perfect cure for me was problem solving. Out of curiosity I was looking at how Facebook hires people a couple of months ago, and found this page of puzzles. For weeks I put off solving them due to some lame excuse of “programmer’s block”. And yet, something happened to me on saturday. I got out of bed, took up a cup of coffee, and just started. It was like the ACM days from 3 years ago! Went the entire weekend without any sleep at all, solving the problems. Goddamn was it fun! I’ve been in a great mood ever since – not one of those endorphin highs which leave you dry after a while, but true happiness and peace.

I guess, everyone has their own guilty pleasure, and as much as I like to pretend I’m not a geek, I guess nothing gives me emotional control as expending nights working on special cases of Travelling Salesman problems, developing wierd graph search algorithms, coding high-precision numerical methods, and the kind.

So here’s to all you geeks out there…. don’t be ashamed of who you are, and there’s no point denying it. We’re geeks, and there’s no greater pleasure in our lives than wasting away in front of our machines, struggling to squeeze that last millisecond out of the known best execution time.