Shocking: Developer ‘Develops’ Herniated Disc In Spine
My back hurts, is what I am trying to say.
not a great week
As a testament to just how hard I am working and how much I tend to push my limits when it comes to spending time on the computer, this week has completely disabled me. I live my life in a constant state of back pain, and numerous components of my life contribute to this — not least of which is sitting at the desk a majority of the time typing away. I am also an avid backpacker and routinely carry between 20–30 pounds on my back for 10–20 mile hiking sessions around once a month. Predictably, this has eventually caught up with me and this week I herniated a disc in my lower back.
Luckily, this happened the day before I was planning to set off on an overnight backpacking trip and I didn’t end up stranded on my back in the middle of the desert. This happened to me at home while cleaning, I set it off by picking up the lid of a server. Servers themselves are heavy, but the lids are pretty light, so I consider this more as “ the straw that broke the Camel’s back” as I don’t think that is the sole cause. I moved a bunch of heavy things before, and had been spending a lot of long nights on the computer working my life away. It definitely makes sense that it happened, but this is the first time something this severe has happened to me in terms of my back.
When my disc first herniated itself, I was stuck on the floor for a few hours. Eventually I managed to get my phone and call for help, by the time help arrived I had inchwormed my way all the way to the bed. I did a bit of research and decided not to go to the E.R. and just tough it out from the bed.
And let me tell you… It has been awful. I only worked for one day last week. Me and the boyfriend have been eating out almost everyday because I cannot stand long enough to cook. I made risotto yesterday and reset my healing progress back to day two by doing so. This has also forced my significant other onto the couch/floor in the living room as I cannot sleep with a partner. I am stuck in the bed, and my lower back feels like it is tied in a knot (that is the perfect description.) Laying on my back 99-percent of the time is also incredibly annoying, especially when it comes to going to bed.
Still, I am determined.
determination
Despite the challenges of this week, I have still gotten things done. Though I have been severely handicapped in my ability to ‘finish’ my huge project by September I am still determined to make it. I have worked in some massive updates to the project from the top down, everything from Olive and ToolipsServables to OliveHighlighters is about to have a pretty significant release. This will all help to solidify the final needs of OliveCreator and will make the final steps of the project revolve solely around designing customized cells, projects, and directories.
It is pretty awesome to look back on just how far I have come just this year. Early this year, I outlined the long arduous road that I traveled this year to finally get where I am at today:
And this has, in fact, become ‘the year of deployment’. https://chifidocs.com is already deployed as the first chifi website and the next website — our interactive Olive -based collaborative notebook-editing web-app — OliveCreator is just on the horizon. Within the remainder of the year, I plan to continuously update these sites while also adding more to my reportoir (EmsComputer and ExploreTheCorners). This will be my main focus for the rest of the year, as well as the obligatory updates to the Chifi ecosystem to complement and drive the updates. Next year I will move onto entirely different types of projects. Not that I am tired of this, just that I like to explore and have had most of my time this year locked on it. Packages like Gattino could also use some work and have yet to be fully realized, so it might be nice to take some time to work on those projects as well.
I broke my leg, but I also painted the ceiling.
back to medium
It is no secret that articles have been quite sparse throughout this year. This is an unfortunate side-effect of the aforementioned determination — I really want to finish this website and be able to publish there (in addition to here) in a far more interactive and dynamic format than Medium is able to offer. This isn’t due to a loss of interest, but is a product of both prioritization and the difficulty of writing these articles — at least for myself.
Because I want to spend most of my open ‘work-time’ on my big project, I leave very little for writing here on Medium. I set release-bound goals for myself within the year and wanted to hold myself to somewhat of a schedule. Writing articles is an incredible experience for me, it allows me to share my passion for programming, communicating, and writing while also producing informative materials that (ideally) expand my readers’ perspectives. I love writing. And I love writing on Medium, as it has allowed me to create, share, and collaborate.
But there is a pretty big downside to writing, especially technical writing… It takes an incredibly long time. Building an article-based Data Science project is akin to building a detailed dashboard. I am passionate about Julia, and what I love most about blogging here is being the person that helps somebody. What satisfies me more than anything is when I am the only Google search result, and as a result I end the search. I seek to do for others what the internet has always done for me, secluded and reading; I see writing on Medium not as a thing to do but as me doing my part. Medium is only the choice of platform, and happens to have great SEO ranking. Just Google “ Encoding in Julia” and tell me I am wrong.
In this case, my piece on the topic is 5th result. If you were to read that article, as a new Julia developer, it would likely be incredibly helpful. That is opinionated, but at the very least the article certainly taught a lot about Julia’s type system and encoding itself as a concept. I will link it for context:
Anyway, these articles tend to take anywhere from 1–3 hours to produce, depending on their complexity. I will admit I tend to procrastinate a hair, I might write some portions piece by piece and hammer through other ones. And a lot of the time I skip paragraphs when editing because it has already taken half my day. When a Medium article takes all of the time I have it is hard to choose it over continuing my development, especially as I get so close to completing it.
Fortunately, I have decided to dedicate a bit more time to this in August, especially with the constant of gnawing pain in my lower back making it difficult to focus on logical puzzles for the time being. It is nice to get more creations under my belt and continue my software story online. It is such a miracle to now be connected with all of you and instantly able to share anything and everything. A platform isn’t just Facebook or MySpace but now Medium, Patreon, and Github. It is pretty beautiful if you ask me. Being able to collaborate, share, and speak to people across the entire planet from you. Regardless as to what ever may happen to me, I am glad we got to spend this time here together and I am so fortunate to have been able to do this in my life. I can’t wait to finally put all of my servers into production!
As per usual, I thank you all for reading. Thanks for clicking on the article that is primarily about overworking yourself to the point you have a broken back and then sitting in the bed on the laptop and still typing. I am stubborn, and now my butt hurts. More articles very soon! ❤
