“Peek in a Geek” is a chance for me to write a little about what goes on in my head when working on geeky stuff. It may be scary, may be amusing, hopefully always entertaining to see what goes through a geek’s brain.
Here’s an analogy for what it’s like solving a problem with a computer program. When you first start out working on the problem, it’s like floating in space–you can go in any direction you want, with no restraints.
The catch is, as soon as you start to move in one direction, walls start to appear and close in around you. The further you go in a particular direction, the more constrained you get. Eventually you may discover you’re in a dead end, so you’ve got to go back to square one and pick another direction to head off in.
It’s like wandering around in a 3D maze, only the paths available to you aren’t immediately obvious. You may end up in a dead end, or you may end up at the maze, but by a much longer route than you could have taken. The concentration it takes to wander through this mental maze can be physically tiring at the end of an eight hour day. Not as physically tiring as, say, delivering GFS product (which I did for one day with one of our delivery drivers), but more so then one might expect for a desk jockey.
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