I’ve spent a lot of this year thinking. I think most people have.

I was sending some random tweets to a friend last week, and I captioned the exchange by saying “… I think this year has made me, and there’s no other way to put it, insufferably Jewish”. (Now, I know I’ve always been insufferable. I was merely commenting on the nature of the insufferability these days). He responded by first assuring me, “that’s not a bad thing” (which is how you can tell he is, indeed, one of my Jewish friends). Next, he said something that’s made me reflect a lot, that “a lot of this year has been identifying what you value”.

What do I value?

I write software for a living. At least, I pretend to. Most of the time, my job is building & running (& yes, occasionally fixing) software other people have written.

One of the aphorisms of software development is that “it’s never a compiler error”. Sure, it’s not never a compiler error, since compilers are written by humans and therefore are as flawed as any other piece of software. But it’s never a compiler error, in the sense that, when you find a bug, the probability of it being caused by a compiler error exists on a set of measure zero.

Well, today I hit the jackpot. This time, it really was a compiler bug.

Almost.

I came across a tweet recently (it’s not that unusual these days). Someone was saying they wanted to get a KitchenAid (do it!) to be able to make homemade pizza dough, and said that this made them a boring adult now. It got me thinking, and then I wrote this.

I’ve contemplated a lot about my life recently. Maybe it’s something to do with being 25. Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten to watch several people around me undertake significant life changes. Maybe it’s because I’m human and we’re prone to doing this sort of thing all the time. I don’t know.