Normally, I keep my nightmares to myself. Mind you, some nightmares are pretty much public domain. The "showing up at school/work naked (or trying very hard to get that way)" one? Check. The "it's the end of the semester and you realise you've been blowing off a class the whole time" one? Oh, heck yeah--my subconscious mind has even upped the ante to multiple classes. (Stupid brain!)
But what if certain subsets of the population also have nightmares in common? In my case, I mean geeks--specifically programmers. (I've had SCA-themed dreams, but to date, the only one that turned ugly was that nightmare about the only fabric store in town morphing into the potpourri-reeking fake-flowers-and-wicker-baskets frou-frou kind of craft store. [shudder] And I don't even want to think about the nightmares that ComicCon-/GenCon folks could have...)
Anyhoo.
The backstory is that in a couple weeks I'm due to give a presentation on Arduino. The slides are done, so it's not like I'm behind. Sure, I don't have more than a few Arduino projects under my belt at this point. Yet I personally know one person more qualified than myself to speak on the subject, and he seems to have zero interest in hanging out with Team Coder. #lesigh
Basically, it's just like that episode of M*A*S*H where Radar finds an abandoned, injured horse, and Hawkeye and B.J. are pressed into veterinarian service. Except that first they have to catch the "patient."
Hawkeye: "You know anything about horses?"Moral of the story: The bar for "expertise" can be set to a very relative--i.e. low--height sometimes. My apologies for any destroyed illusions there.
B.J.: "I rode a pony once."
Hawkeye: "You're in charge."
So, yeah, I feel kinda like a poser...except I'm probably still in a position to save my fellow geeks a whole bunch of time reading/Googling--not to mention possibly some bling on hardware besides. Which might explain why last evening's nightmare was about not being able to find the presentation slides on my laptop, rather than about freezing up under the gaze of my peers.
But while curating my resistor collection this morning, I had time to reflect on said nightmare. Which is when I had a disconcerting epiphany. It wasn't so much that I was worried about being worried about the presentation. It was the awful suspicion that this might become an archetype for my dreaming mind. And, worse, what if this is merely one species in the genus of programmer nightmares? There are dark, dark regions in the left-brain. Yet, like any self-respecting D&D dungeon, they somehow support a thriving ecosystem of nastiness:
- Project requirements include IE6/7 backwards-compatibility.
- Source control hiccup leaves code in partially merged state, but you don't catch on until you've made a whole pile of changes to your local copy. #beentheredonethat
- Zero downloads from the App. Store.
- You think you're working in the test database, but it's actually the live copy. #gotthatbadgetoo #twice
- The "ninja" co-worker your boss hired (over your objections) isn't sanitising inputs...but is rewriting core APIs that s/he doesn't understand...which is clearly most of them.
- The historical data that you didn't realise was critical when you archived it to tape won't restore.
- 1:1 assumptions during design magically turn into n:n expectations during beta. #crazytalkinorite
- User(s) demanding to know why there are "obvious" (to them) bugs in the app. that they agreed to review before sign-off...after they've signed off.
- Unscheduled system maintenance and/or power outage during a code roll-out weekend.
- Apple/Microsoft/Google rolls out an uber-slick near-clone of your world-changing app. the week before you're supposed to close your next round of funding.
