Battling Time

The clock slowly ticks on…

Tic, toc, tic, toc….

It’s 3:30 am and everything seems to be asleep. Normally, I’m coding at my desk with a glass of orange juice listening to movie theme tracks like “Time” by Hans Zimmer from Inception while the dark of a Seattle Night rests against my windows. I’m at peace as I chisel away at my code.

What am I coding? Depends on the night, but you can tell from my whiteboard, as each night there is something new on it. This week it was modeling the flow of a rules engine for validating bank wires, one part of my work for Microsoft. The week before it was filled with data-flow models from my React UI to a SQL database for an app my school asked me to build.

Tic, toc, tic, toc….

But why am I doing all of this so late into the night?

Tic, toc, tic, toc….

I’m battling time. Seeing how much territory I can claim before my moments are up.

Tic, toc, tic, toc….

I didn’t know how to handle the idea of time as a kid and, when it became too much, I’d hide with my two stuffed dogs, my white blanket, warm vanilla milk, and the Calvin and Hobbes book The Days Are Just Packed. Under that blanket I would curl up and lose myself in Calvin’s antics as Spaceman Spiff.

Tic, toc, tic, toc….

Eventually, I found a much better way to deal with time: through soccer. Each day I would come home and rush through homework so I could go outside and practice until it got so dark I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. But after suffering twelve major injuries in between 6th and 11th grade I could feel all the time that I’d lost while recovering. This led to a burnout and caused me to transition away from soccer. So I did. During my recovery time I’d been learning to code through my own projects and CodeAcademy. As I entered high school, coding started to take over, and all the time I’d poured into soccer instead went to coding and the time I invested into coding led to some exciting personal projects such as a physics equation solver, a chip8 emulator and a compiler for my own language.

Tic, toc, tic, toc….

Recently, I’ve found another way to fight time: cooking. Last weekend I spent ten hours in the kitchen cooking a rosemary shrimp pan-seared in olive oil, a celery and green apple salad and a homemade pasta and ragu for my girlfriend’s family. I cook because it allows me to meditate, which allows me to reflect upon the past week. Without this time to reflect I wouldn’t change and if I can’t change, then I can’t learn. If I can not learn then I will not be prepared for my next battle with time.

Tic, toc, tic, toc….

In the future, I plan to fight time through projects such as a city infrastructure software, robotic construction, and a physics education platform. These projects are important to me because they give back to others, whether that be through education or repairing our country’s aging roads. I want to give back using my skills to increase the quality of life for others around me.

Tic, toc, tic, toc….

Time never stops, so why should I? Why should I stop learning? Why should I stop asking why? The answer is, I shouldn’t. Just like time, I never should stop. I plan to continue to wage my battle against time by learning everything that I can. And I will. But I also won’t forget things I love: Calvin’s sled, homemade pastas, lacing up cleats before a game, and tinkering away late into the night on my computer.