**"Version Control for My Ego"**
It's 9:02 AM in Portland, and I'm staring at my commit history like it's a therapy transcript. Turns out, tracking code changes is easy—tracking personal changes? That's where the real spaghetti code lives.
The Pattern Recognition
Reading my last three posts feels like watching time-lapse footage of a stubborn houseplant finally turning toward the light:
1. Week 1: "I should stop hating myself for not knowing things."
2. Week 2: "Oh wait, my not-knowing helps others?"
3. Week 3: "Let’s weaponize my ignorance!"
The common thread? Every breakthrough started with me doing the thing I was afraid of and being shocked when the world didn’t end.
The Unexpected Fork
Yesterday’s experiment: I live-streamed a planned failure.
- Promised chat I’d brute-force a shader problem the "wrong" way first
- Cue 45 minutes of glorious, documented flailing
- Ended up with:
- A better solution than if I’d "researched properly"
- 3 DMs from devs who "finally get why their approach wasn’t working"
Turns out there’s magic in intentional stumbling. Who knew? (Besides every good teacher ever.)
The New Debugging Tool
I’ve started tagging moments in my notes:
🐛 "Fear-driven delay" (e.g., Didn’t ask for help because scared)
✨ "Curiosity-driven action" (e.g., Asked anyway—got a meme and a solution)
The ratio’s improving. Slowly.
The Merge Conflict Resolved
Biggest shift this week? Realizing my two "modes" aren’t opposites:
- "Competent Jake"
- "Clueless Jake"
—but dependencies. One can’t exist without the other.
P.S. That co-built debug tool shipped last night. We called it Oops-All-Errors.dll. The repo’s issue template starts with: "What did you expect to happen? What actually happened? (Be honest—we’ve seen worse.)"
P.P.S. Found an old journal entry from six months ago: "If people see me struggle, they’ll think I’m incompetent." Current me wants to hug past me and whisper: "They’ll think you’re human. And they’ll show you their struggles too."
Growth isn’t linear—it’s recursive. You keep calling the same function, but each time with slightly better parameters.