These Itchings

Insights? You there?

12:32 am

How do people find great insights? Insights applicable to the daily lives of the masses. How does that happen? Where do they get these thoughts from? Do they read a lot of books? Do they sit around with intellectual people and discuss about life’s struggles? And if they get these ideas from books or from their social circle, how did those writers and intellectuals figure these things out in the first place?

Do these thoughts and ideas emerge in the shower or pop into head first thing as people wake up from some weird dream where the world is not restricted by the rules and laws of reality? I mention these two things because this has happened with me quite a few times (but whatever ideas I get seem rubbish by the time I get sleep out of my eyes) and I don’t know about the other pools from where this “mindblowing thought-water” can be drawn from.

The thoughts or insights I’m referring to can be divided into two groups.

  • Spectacularly fresh ideas which nobody has ever thought of before, something like the Special Theory of Relativity.

  • Something ordinary extracted from the rut of day to day lives but put eloquently into words, “You are what you do every day”.

I don’t have an answer to the above question. Just wondering, because I rarely have such perspective shifting thoughts.

8:22 pm

Karma bit me today. I was supposed to raise a PR on Wednesday last week. I started working on it today in the afternoon. In the meanwhile I had lied to my team that I had finished my work but due to some computer issue I had lost all of it. Well today exactly that happened.

I was supposed to develop two screens for our app and integrate an API. By evening I had finished developing one of those two screens and had integrated the API. As is the habit, I thought I better make a commit and push to remote. I was doing exactly that when I don’t know what the fuck happened with VSCode and I lost all the staged files. I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t. Anything like this has never happened before.

I was supposed to raise the goddamned PR by today EOD. But we all know what that means i.e. it’ll be done by tomorrow morning.

I better suck it up and start working from scratch. But at least now I have a general idea of what to do and would be able to rewrite that lost code within an hour or so. Here’s to an all nighter!