The Healing Power of Code

I recently came across Craig Mod’s article for Wired, “The Healing Power of Code,” and it was like encountering myself in a mirror.

Break the problem into pieces. Put them into a to-do app (I use and love Things). This is how a creative universe is made. Each day, I’d brush aside the general collapse of society that seemed to be happening outside of the frame of my life, and dive into search work, picking off a to-do. Covid was large; my to-do list was reasonable.

The real joy of this project wasn’t just in getting the search working but the refinement, the polish, the edge bits. Getting lost for hours in a world of my own construction. Even though I couldn’t control the looming pandemic, I could control this tiny cluster of bits.

During my encounter with COVID, back in March 2020, I was only about six weeks into my new job. I had all the encouragement from my (new) managers to “take all the time [I] needed” and “not be afraid of taking sick days, even though you’re new.” I suppose I couldn’t have explained that I needed the work, for the same reason. Rewriting paragraphs of curriculum or writing new blocks of code was something that made it possible to forget the breaths that felt like they were moving spider webs of fiberglass in my lungs.

Throughout these last few months I’ve been writing code to help me sort my memories better. I was surprised that Mod was also doing the same:

…I moved websites from my old server to my new server. My tasks were guided by the trusty to-do list. URLs of old sites marked off distinct epochs in my life, of a variety of lenses through which I once saw myself. Perhaps I am this kind of artist or will be this kind of writer?

I couldn’t help but recognize my recent rewrite of my /posts/by/year/2004/ page as having the same effect on me. Tracing those titles, those places, those names, those idiotic TV shows provided a certain peace. I wrote code to transmute from one format to another. I wrote little bits to make embedding YouTube simpler or easier. I made my software smarter in tiny ways so that things would get more manageable, searchable, more mine.

He described my present “reclaim my social media and make my site better so that it can handle all those additional inputs” project so well with:

A lot of this server work involved making complicated sites less complex. …Gutting these sites of their PHP cores, [turning them back] …into sleepy HTML and CSS, making them low maintenance and future friendly. It’s funny how even something as simple as a MYSQL database requires pruning, nurture. How a PHP script—so seemingly innocuous!—is rendered obsolete a decade later as deprecation creeps, mental models of languages evolve. But take a page of HTML from the early ’90s, and it renders as well as ever on most anything with a screen.

I looked back in my archives and could see where I went from Movable Type static site generator, to Wordpress, off of Wordpress to Octopress, and off Octopress to Hugo (Mod’s tool of choice as well). It seems all of us who came of age in the early Internet are having the same moment and the same emotion in this pandemic turbulence.

Mod closed:

And so I pull apart a system—a system that I have loved and has served me well over the years—and figure out a better, more sustainable framework for the code, and one hopes, by extension, maybe even the world.

Glorious.