beans

The autumn of 2009 was warm and gradual in southtown Kansas City. I rented a small house in a nice neighbourhood and got to spend most evenings propped up with pillows with a laptop running Linux, trying to solve a problem no one asked me to. I was supporting a small online bookseller that relied upon custom-built software to generate prices, and so one day I realise it could work so much efficiently in Java. 

So, I started porting it from VB to Java, each evening, on a laptop running Linux, next to a cracked-open window with a glass or beer or bourbon sitting on it.  That was back before Facebook games became lame or addictive, depending upon who you ask, and around then it would be time for friends to work on each other's farms. Eventually that game went absolutely nowhere but it fit the moment, along with local TV showing Star Trek TNG each weeknight.

Thanks to some down-home roots there will always be soup beans and ham pumping through these veins, but for the single male, a quarter-can of boiled SPAM in some Van Kamp's Pork N Beans does just fine, no kidding. Fills a bowl and then the soul. Sometimes a dab of cottage cheese would chase it well.

I can't say how long this went on, it was more of a clonal moment, a series of evenings making strides with the code, step by step, closer to a solution, chatting with friends along the way. As it turns out my motivation for doing the Java project was never clear, it just needed to happen.

As with all moments, they are just that, and they must end. This one gave way to a confusing set of events, the company changed hands, and along came one of the harshest winters I'd ever known - literally and figuratively. The ground was covered for weeks in foot-thick frozen snow, the city's prize walking trail rendered useless and I was stuck in that house with not enough work to keep a cat alive.

A few months before, I had pitched the Java version to the company owner and he was probably interested if it could be proven superior, then I would ask for a fee.  But then, I was realising my love for code there in that geeky bliss, and so the longer I kept it up the notion of a direct payoff grew less and less important.

As it turns out, just over a year later I got a real job that's soaked in code, not Java, but close enough.