"Beautiful Mind" ramblings.

I was reflecting the other day about how I'd describe how I do code in my head.

When I'm in work mode, I'm all database, all the time, so everything is a dataset.

They all interact with each other in the same way, and I just throw them up in my minds eye, with foreign key connections and all, and as it filters down through the rest of the query, I can *feel* whether it's complete or not. Often times testing fills out that feeling. But I keep chasing that weird itch that it's not quite right, until it submits, or we can't find any more problematic examples.

Closest thing I could think of was the girl from the show "The Librarians", Lindy Booth. OMG, she's so hot, nerdier the better... Sigh... I digress... Her ability in the show was portrayed more magical. She could do it at will, figure shit out, and move on with the adventure.

This irked me, because the show makes it out to be unknown magic... So I got to thinking about other portrayals in media.. Russell Crowe in a Beautiful Mind... YEUP.

He was batshit crazy, but still a functional genius. I'm ok with being different, but I hope I don't go over 20% of that *kind* of difference.

-- wrote the top part a few weeks ago, below part actual date. I don't think anyone is reading me, not supposed to care, right?

I have enough conspiracy theories already, YouTube Farsight Human News. All I want to say is that I watched the US Capitol Siege happen... *days* before it actually did. Not fucking around. Still rocks me to think about it.

This brings up an irrational fear, often lately, as the pandemic is lifting.

If I go too deep into my job, treating everything as a dataset, will this affect my relationship with reality, given my mental illness?

I overanalyze things, which is sometimes an issue, but it's also why my shit always works.

When I switch paradigms, like between normal sql server database code and sql server analysis services, it literally makes my head hurt for the rest of the day.

Am I blowing smoke up my own ass? Maybe, but my last project...

I had zero notice. My company's credit card processor said "sorry, you're fucked in 6 months, because your software is too old!"

So we're mid conversion of PointOfSale systems (I've helped a little).

It's went ok, relatively speaking, but canned Vendor reports always suck, and rarely apply to your flavor of business. That's where I come in like John Wick.

I just spent 4 months architecting a system (alone) that took my closest competitor a year and a half to complete (with a team) soup to nuts, while they had 2+ years notice that their PointOfSale system was dying. Snowflake is quite stable, fingers crossed. Glad to leave RedShift behind. It was fast, but trashed out too often to be reliable.

IT is a thankless job. Sometimes we have to pat ourselves on our backs. Pat Pat Pat.