Meditations

In Marcus Aurelias's Meditations he states "Some things are hurrying to come into being, others are hurrying to be gone, and part of that which is being born is already extinguished. Flows and changes are constantly renewing the world, just as the ceaseless passage of time makes eternity ever young. In this river, then, where there can be no foothold, what should anyone prize of all that races past him? It is as if he were to begin to fancy one of the little sparrows that fly past - but already it is gone from his sight. Indeed this is the nature of our very lives - as transient as the exhalation of vapour from the blood or a breath drawn from the air. No different from a single breath taken in and returned to the air, something which we do every moment, no different is the giving back of your whole power of breathing - acquired at your birth just yesterday or thereabouts - to that world from which you first drew it."

I just pasted that quote in two roundtrips from my iPhone to my Macbook because the statement was spread across two pages of a tiny book.

Technology can be an incredible thing. My hand is a bit squished owing to the tension of the spine of a newly purchased book and my unwillingness to feed into vanity. The first highlighted part, "Some things are hurrying to come into being, others are hurrying to be gone, and part of that which is being born is already extinguished. Flows and changes are constantly renewing the world, just as the ceaseless passage of time makes eternity ever young." perfectly encapsulates how I feel about that rapid changes in software today and the company I work for's inability to adopt better tools. It is their inability to do this that has forced me to retire my position there.

Yet I am still stuck, laboring on this never ending task of proving it to them. While they languish, the tools are already here. They are safer (no memory corruption,) faster (native compilation,) better supported (not abandoned,) and easier to reason about (they were built on the most modern operating systems available, containing the necessary software to debug issues and trace the path of execution as far as those operating systems allow.) Somehow, mystically, magically, or fated through divine intervention (as i scratch my head like a tattooed deranged Albert Einstein) the software that allows these things has not progressed since the start of my career here, three years ago. I know that because I constantly revisit that software and the best is still the best, it's written in Rust, and the most important tools save for exa (which has been abandoned and whose mantel has been picked up by eza) are still the same and our teams ability to solve problems as a team consistently declines.

Not a single engineer, product liaison, quality assurance engineer, or engineering manager has turned on their camera since the first day I began this job. Members of other teams fly into our daily standup meetings, or weekly review meetings, or weekly planning meetings, camera on ready to work. Not a single member of our team does. When I offered to jump on cam to review our issues adopting technology Apeachalonius was coincidentally sick and no one on our team was ready to speak to the issues. The last time a manager forced the issue, made themselves visibly vulnerable to discuss anything was Admiral Hayden who has been promoted up the chain enough that he need not force the issue. Any time I attempted to set a trend by appearing on camera, whether it be during standups or manager lead 1 on 1 meetings I was met with swift resistance from the plethora of security settings, the rearranging of these settings due to operating system updates and the impedance caused by the settings of the software that run on those operating systems governing the same pathway from the camera to the operating system. Those issues have been resolved in my office, on my company provided laptop. Most of team members don't even use photographs for avatars.

Spread across the inside spine of the book is sprawled "No different from a single breath taken in and returned to the air, something which we do every moment, no different is the giving back of your whole power of breathing - acquired at your birth just yesterday or thereabouts - to that world from which you first drew it." This also took two roundtrips from my phone to this laptop, this technology is revolutionary. It's extremely simple to use, in this case for one who has at least one working optic nerve and a single digit capable of pressing the screen of the phone and the fine motor skills required to follow the path of the hilighted, or unhilighted text on the screen. Any text on the screen.

I can't help but laugh every time I read this passage. Marcus Aurelius necessarily easing his conscience about the slaughter he's witnessed and taken part in and me, an atom to Software Engineering imagining all of the open-source software rising up to dethrone the best, blinking out existence with each breath. Cameras on tomorrow fellas, unless of course you have a legitimate reason not to.