Spain is the country of metaphors. It’s our way of expressing intricate feelings and ideas (and not so intricate). Spanish moms are known for their use of proverbs, expressions, and metaphors to teach their children about basic manners and life. My mom is one of them. I grew up with a Disney book, “El Libro de los Buenos Modales” (“The Book of Good Manners”), that taught me so much about good manners and how to behave. My mom would read it with me, adding her own Spanish sayings and point of view. 

One of the expressions I grew up with is “sweeping the desert”. It’s a metaphor for doing something silly, useless, and endless. 

This weekend I realized I’ve been doing that for 5 years! Isn’t that amazing? Not that I’ve wasted my time, I’ve lived and worked in 3 different countries, I’ve met awesome people, but I’ve been doing things backwards. For so much time, I’ve been trying to become something I’m not. I got into a sciences degree when I loved art, photography, and writing. I tried imposing discipline on myself when I’m more chaotic than Chaos himself. I’ve been trying to ‘fix’ myself for so long that I forgot I was fixing myself (or what I was fixing). 

I miss so much of myself. I miss writing my stories, I miss playing electric guitar, I miss taking pictures, trying to develop them, and making an absolute mess with the chemicals, I miss going to Jazz concerts, I miss getting my hands covered in paint.

Fuck it, let’s do it, right? Fuck it. Fuck it. Let’s do this thing. 

Truth to be told, I take things seriously. Maybe too much? What for you is a small detail, for me is a small universe in itself. For me, a pixel in the wrong place is a small pin piercing through my skin. For me, a badly thought line of code is an eyelash in my eye. Allow me to clarify: I’m not a perfectionist for the simple fact that I don’t believe in perfection. Perfection is an imaginary concept, much like infinity, that no one has ever achieved; not even God, Zeus, or fairy tale heroes. 

I am, however, cursed by the way I see the universe around me. I work very well under extremely low layers of abstraction: pixels, bits, brush strokes. I also work well under extremely high levels of abstraction: ideas, concepts, entire systems. However, the world between those two levels is, for me, as difficult as keeping balance in the joint event horizon of two intersecting equally gravitationally powerful black holes. That is, fucking difficult. Believe it or not, this has impacted how I do things, both in my personal and professional life. 

In my professional life, I try to create things that avoid ambiguities and, if possible, avoid intersecting organic systems through a synthetic approach. In design work, that has translated to: avoiding gradients, rounded corners, and shadows, amongst other visual elements. I appreciate that some people are able to design very visually compelling elements of that nature, but I know I’m not one of them. Why? Printers and computers render gradients in a horrible way, even with the latest technology. This is because, mathematically speaking, rendering a numerically perfect gradient with digital technology is impossible (explaining this would require a week on Euclidian spaces, spectrum of light, computer graphics, and a crappy homemade redefinition of the Nyquist–Shannon theorem, and that bores me, so I am not going to explain it. Just know that the gradients you create with kindergarden watercolors are millions of times more precise than the ones you see on computer screens). It’s a pity. Gradients are cute. 

And I digressed again. That escalated quickly, huh? 

In code, I do things in an analogous way. I don’t like ambiguous code, and I tend to avoid data structures that rely on the efficiency of human-made algorithms to be successful. That’s why you will rarely see me using hash tables (I haven’t found yet a collision algorithm that I like). Bear in mind that code is imperfect by definition, since it’s made by humans. There have been attempts to make ‘perfect’ code, and some college professors will tell you such thing exists. It doesn’t. The very same logical systems used to verify code rely on human correctness, and that is a chimera of the imagination of thousands of researchers worldwide. (Last time I tried to prove this point to a professor of mine using entropy, statistical mechanics, and philosophy, I was ‘booted off the stage’, so who knows if I’m right at all). It’s a pity. Hash tables are cute. Linear probing is cute. Shitty but cute. 

In the personal aspect, the two black holes I talked about before are very much present. One is called Deimos and the other one is called Euphrosyne. The power I need to keep myself balanced between those two is only comparable to the amount of energy released if every particle of a pencil was annihilated by a counterpart antiparticle. Trust me, that’s a lot of energy. 

So yeah, I give a fuck. Every pixel, every line of code, every opportunity, every angle, every handshake, every gesture. They matter to me. 

And if you’ve had the courage to finish reading this rant, maybe they matter to you too?