shriker.caI was nine when I wrote my first HyperCard application with HyperTalk. I was inspired by an animation I saw of a bird crapping on a person and Stephen King’s IT. (I was nine, remember.) I sat on the floor, the computer on a box, with my knees up to my chin, creating stacks. Was the alignment off? Did I fat-finger the mouseUp instruction? Did it hold a second time, a third, a fourth?
I kept looking at it. That was the whole experience. Writing the stacks. The checking. The “does it hold.” No compile step, no build process. Just editing and running.
I shared it with our teaching librarian. He gave me a star. ⭐ “cool application!!” Fine. I noted it. I kept looking at it.
The star was a garnish. That’s all it was.
The making was the meal.
I have been eating that meal for over thirty years. But the meal was never the problem. The room was the problem. I learned what the room does to the meal, young.
Community college, or: the punch#
The first room was a community college. Okay program. Decent faculty. Fine on paper. It was not my first choice. The centralized post-secondary application system had lost my data because it did not recognize my rural route mailing address. RR#X Box 2XX → /dev/null, status: 200 OK Instead of letting me take a year to work on my business, my parents forced me into community college. I paid for that in more ways than one.
The first semester was an experience. I was surrounded by people for whom the work was a chore, and the work was fine, and fine was the entire ceiling of the place. I wasn’t fine. I was doing it well. I was doing it at 3am with version three already sketched because version two had something wrong I could feel with my teeth.
My classmates noticed.
Not the way the librarian did. More the way a room notices a dog in a kitchen.
They physically hit me.
Usually not with full force. A nudge that was not a nudge. A “bump” in the hallway that had a little more elbow in it than gravity should allow. A hand on the shoulder that stayed a half-second too long. The kind of contact that says you are in my way, you are doing too much of the thing, you are making me look like a person who is not doing the thing, and the only correction available to the hand is to make you stop.
Nobody would have called it a punch. Nobody would have written it up. It was a bump. I was being sensitive.
But I’d been nine. I knew what making felt like. The knees to the chin. The live reload to see if it held. And I knew what a hand on your shoulder that stays there feels like. I knew. I was nine, and I had never been wrong about a room.
I was the service that responded in two milliseconds, in a building where the orchestrator sent one request a day. The other services had decided, with their hands, that I was taking up too much CPU.
I left. I knew. I knew.
University, or: the portfolio#
The next room had portfolio-based admissions. You brought the thing you made. Not your grades. The thing. What you’d actually built. What you’d actually sat down and made with your hands and your head and your specific, unrepeatable way of thinking about a problem.
Then your portfolio was judged against other portfolios. Real ones. By people who knew what good looked like.
The room was different.
I walked in and I did not have to do the math. I could see the math. The other people in the room had made things. They’d broken things. They’d written the three versions. They’d argued with themselves at 3am about something they could feel with their teeth. I looked around the room and I thought, oh.
Oh, I belong here.
The work landed in a room where someone flinched. Someone said “wait, how did you actually do that?” and meant it.
You stood in front of the room for a rapid-fire critique. Your work, your decisions, were the target.
They wanted the process. The code. What was wrong. The tradeoffs. The nuance. They wanted you to do better.
Doing-it-well mattered. In community college, doing it well was an act of war, because the work was a chore and the chore was fine and you had improved the chore. In university, doing it well was the entry fee. You were expected to have three versions. You were expected to have a thing you could feel in your teeth. The polish was not a luxury. Not an afterthought. Baseline polish was why you were in the room.
I found my people. Not a room. Not a program. People. The ones who’d already done the three versions. The ones who reloaded the page four times to check the alignment, not to count the stars.
We went on to be lawyers, CISOs, creative directors, MBAs, product designers, video game art designers, production and SFX artists, project directors. The things we built run under the feet of millions of people who never knew our names.
We were a very dangerous university peer group.
Different fields. Same three versions. Same “does it hold.”
The doing-it-well had a witness for the well.
Now, the job. Or: the nod#
I work in a building. The room changed. It’s my home office. The making got quieter. I reviewed the architecture for the new platform. Found the trust boundary in the wrong place. A path that didn’t close. I built the control to close it. Three versions. Version one was the first pass. Version two had a gap I could feel in my teeth. A path I’d missed. Version three was the one where every path held, and I could feel it holding, and I sat at my desk at 3am looking at the architecture and I grinned.
I wrote up the gap analysis for the before/after. I put it in the channel.
“Nice.”
One syllable. One vowel. That’s the whole review.
I know this feeling now. The community college taught me that a high performer in a passive room is not unseen. The room sees you. The room has seen you the whole time. The room has decided that you are doing too much of the thing, and the room has a hand, and the hand is on your shoulder, and the hand stays there.
University taught me that it is possible to be in a room where the doing-it-well has a witness. Where the three versions are expected. Where someone looks at version three and says “oh, that’s what you were actually doing.” Once you’ve found that room, you know the shape of the absence. You can tell when the shape is gone. You can name the exact moment the room went from oh, I belong here to bump.
The nod is the grown-up bump. The one-syllable review is the hand that stays on the shoulder half a second too long. “Nice” is “you’re making me look like a person who is not doing the thing, and I have decided you are fine, which is my way of saying you are done.”
I know some of you need the star. ⭐ The loop. The “cool application!!” You need the room to close the circuit, and when it doesn’t, that’s a real wound, and it’s not the one I’m writing about, but I see you, and it’s not nothing, and you don’t have to perform your wound differently to make it fit my post.
What you do#
You don’t have to leave. You don’t have to narrate every step like a nature documentary. That’s exhausting, and it’s not what you signed up for.
You do have to find the shape of the university again. Or build one. Game recognizes game.
Find the new Tuesday. Break something on purpose. A high performer with no new problems is a person who’s stopped being dangerous. Find the edge case you’ve never hit. The stack you’ve never touched. The constraint you’ve never worked under. The side project that’s actually a different shape, not the same Tuesday in a different font. The thing you keep saying you will break. Break it. At 3am. See what the seam looks like when it’s yours to find.
And when you do ship the thing, the thing with the three versions that stole your sleep and a grin nobody witnessed, make sure it lands in front of someone who’ll look at version three and say “oh, that’s what you were actually doing.” Not “nice.” The other thing. The handshake. The well having a witness for the well.
If the room won’t give you that, find a smaller room. A channel with three people instead of fifty. A peer who’s already done the three versions. A code review that actually asks “why did you do it that way.” You don’t need the whole org to reload the page. You need one person who will.
You already know what it feels like. You’ve been in it. You were there, once, and you walked in, and you looked around, and you thought oh. Then you left, or they moved you, or the org reshuffled, and you’re in the community college again, and the hand is on your shoulder, and it stays.
You know the difference. You’ve always known the difference. You were nine. You reloaded the page four times. Not for the star. For the making. You just have to find the room again.