As I draw closer to releasing the first early alpha of a library I've been working on for several years, I've noticed that it's release time coincides with some rather depressing politics that I wish I could ignore. Unfortunately, it's difficult to ignore politicians who seek to destroy the lives of your closest friends. A common theme I hear from my friends is a feeling of helplessness, as though we all know terrible things are happening, but no one really knows what to do about it.
But we are not helpless. It is so easy to lose ourselves in pessimism and cynicism, to think that everything will continue to be shit simply because it's been shit for so many years. A common refrain I heard while still working at a large corporation was, we know our code is shit, but it's okay, because everyone else's code is shit. This kind of mentality really bothers me, not because it isn't true, but because it seems to reflect a resigned, cynical view of the world, and never strives to do better. Yes, everything might end up being shit in the end, but if we don't even attempt to build something better, we never will. If we hadn't been trying to write better code we never would have invented structured programming, or object oriented programming, or functional programming. Each innovation builds on the last, and each innovation has it's faults, but each brings us one step closer to not being shit.
What disturbs me is that the software industry's inability to strive for better code now mirrors a feeling of political resignation, a malaise that seems to be settling on our polarized political discourse. If democracy isn't working, what else can we do? If the entire system is corrupt, what hope do we have of fixing it? As wealth inequality rises to ever more absurd levels, our society is tumbling towards a breaking point. Just like a badly maintained software stack, our society is threatening to topple over under economic stresses it was never built to handle. How much longer can we keep it running with duct-tape and terrible hacks? It is our duty to push for real change, to build a better foundation for our future using whatever skills or resources we have.
As I prepare my library for its initial release, I'm not just zipping up a bunch of files to upload to GitHub. I'm lighting a fire, a beacon of hope that I will cast out into the endless night, praying that it might lead us to a brighter future. I am joined by millions of other flickering flames, many of which will fade with time. A few, however, will grow brighter and brighter, until they bring forth a new dawn and shepherd us into a bright new future, even if only for a moment, before sinking below the horizon. Our entire society is built on these brief moments of clarity. Some are longer than others, but all are important. Even when the night seems to stretch on without end, the rays of hope from a thousand stars can still point us in the right direction.
We all wish for a brighter future, a future free from disease and poverty and war and hunger. We seek the future that we envision for ourselves in our stories and movies. Sometimes, it seems like society is going backwards, when everything is going wrong and nothing seems to go right for anyone. But it is in these moments that we must not forget the most important thing: we cannot wait for the future to come to us, we must build it ourselves. 2016 was not a very good year for many people. 2017 shows signs of being even worse, but I don't care.
I'm going to make 2017 be a better year. I'm going to make the future I want to live in. I'm going to build the tools I wish I had. We are not pawns in some cosmic game, we are human beings. We are free agents capable of making our own decisions, and I'm making a decision to make the future happen, whether it wants to or not.
I'm not letting this year take me down without a fight.
