To play a game or to make a game, that is the question. My self-discipline has slipped. After almost a month of regular work, I started playing a new season in Championship Manager. Isaac Okoronkwo and Maxim Tsigalko are in excellent form, and it’s hard to keep my mind off the game.
In the past month, we’ve written several thousand lines of code. All those characters formed a single entity. One wrong character could completely halt the execution of the game. A period instead of a comma, an extra letter in a variable name, or a missing minus sign. And it wasn’t just that—the code could be syntactically flawless, yet during execution, something might be calculated or displayed incorrectly. There have been instances where spacecraft were destroyed due to programmer errors, resulting in enormous material damage. There are plenty of such examples. All of this has caused me mild anxiety.
How could I be sure that the thousands of lines of code were working correctly? How could I confidently make changes to a program that might be used by tens of thousands of people? What if I made a mistake?
I was slowly getting used to the situation. I felt that I had been doing this long enough and that over time, I would become more confident. After all, this is a family tradition. I remember, back in the late ‘80s, just as I had started school, in my uncle Vladimir’s teenage room, watching his group of friends eagerly recording software from the radio.
They were listening to a radio show for computer hobbyists, and the broadcast of program code had begun. My uncle pressed “record” on the tape recorder and recorded the sound from the radio. The climax of their excitement was testing the downloaded software on a Commodore computer. And it worked!
They taught me to write basic commands shortly after I learned to write. So, I suppose I can do this now. After all, the others doing this didn’t start much earlier than I did.
I talked to Elena about this potential stress source. This will be our job. We’ll likely write code for decades. Right now, we’re stressed about a few thousand lines of code. Later, we’ll probably be maintaining hundreds of thousands. We’ll be responsible for systems like that.
For us, it’s stress, but for my uncle, it was an escape from stress. He even programmed during the war. There were periods when the armies were quiet. During one such period, he found himself on the frontline, where soldiers from both sides were locals. Before the war, they had all attended the same high school, worked in the same companies, and lived in the same neighborhoods. The only outsiders were my uncle Vladimir and his friend Saša, who had been reassigned away from their unit as a form of punishment related to their discipline.
For months, no one fired a shot. Other units didn’t rotate in, and no one tried to shift the frontline. Soldiers began shouting to each other from their trenches, asking who was still alive, who had been wounded, or who had been captured. Soon after, they began visiting each other. My uncle connected a few trenches to the power grid, and after his first leave, he brought a Commodore to the trench.
Elena was baffled when I told her about it.
“Wait, the Commodore was a laptop?”
“No, they had electricity in the trench.”
“Where did the electricity come from?”
“My uncle installed it.”
Uncle Vladimir and Saša even finished programming a game there. It was the only peaceful episode they experienced during the war. After the war, the Commodore was outdated, and no one was interested in publishing their game.
The team is meeting tomorrow, and I need to finish what I promised to deliver. I’ll need at least a few hours, maybe more if things don’t go smoothly. I might work all night. Usually, solutions appear around dawn, but I don’t want to spend tonight like that. If I had worked three hours a day over the past few days, there wouldn’t be any problems now. It’s just hard to get used to working from home.
Maxim has the same problem, so we’ve been discussing working together from a shared space and maybe inviting a few others. Perhaps we could set up some kind of hub. Elena mockingly suggested we’d be creating a rehub.
An email from Elena arrives. She’s postponing tomorrow’s meeting. She can’t find time in the next three days.
That’s a relief. Now I have time. I launch CM again. It’ll take a minute to start.
I wonder what Boyana from Italian class is up to these days and where she might be. I haven’t run into her anywhere lately.
