In another world, I'm a writer. Not a writer of blog posts or code, but a write of fiction. In that world I went to the Arcadia University in Philadelphia and got an MFA in Creative Writing. In that world, I have a collection of short stories that was published at the height of the pandemic by a small, independent publisher. In that world, I'm not just another tech bro. I'm someone else entirely, immersed in the worlds I have created in my own mind.
But there is the other world. The world of tech and code and startups and valuations. The world of open source, of code editors, of side projects, and of product management. In that world, I am a developer and a product manager. I am a consumer of all the newest trends in tech. I am, as you see on this blog, a sharer of thoughts on those trends.
Those worlds are separate but related. They make up a whole, and that whole is me. We all live in multiple worlds with various levels of segregation achieved through happenstance or considered planning. For every person you think you know at work there is a different version of that person at home, a different version sitting in their car at lunch or lifting weights at the gym before work. All of their versions of themselves unify into the whole person, of whom you might only know a part.
Yet, every so often, there is a collision of worlds. Today I experienced one such collision. I was reading the front page of Hacker News like I do every morning before my kids get up for school. I'm drawn to Hacker News because it skews technical, but the topics often stretch beyond the technical or are only tangentially related to the technical. It was one of these tangentially related articles that caught my attention this morning. At the time, the article was ranked 4th on Hacker News. It was a piece called My Truck Desk, written in the Paris Review.
Now I know The Paris Review from my literary world, and I was immediately intrigued by its appearance on Hacker News. Though such sources of information are not foreign to the site—I often see articles from the Los Angeles Review of Books and similar—there was still something intriguing about "high brow" content from a decidedly analog publication such as The Paris Review appearing on the front page of Hacker News.
I read the article without paying attention to the author, as I usually do. It's an unfair practice that I should get better at. Throughout the read, I was drawn in by the author's voice, the storytelling, and the author's own descriptions of their worlds colliding. As I reached the end of the article, the author was mentioned again with more details about who they were. And I was immediately struck by a collision of my literary and tech worlds.
The article was written by Bud Smith. I don't know Bud personally, but I interacted with many of the students who were in his MFA cohort. Bud was one cohort behind me in Arcadia University's MFA program. I knew him by reputation and by his cohort-mates. I knew him by proximity.
Arcadia is not a big school. It's not the most well-known MFA program in the country, but it's a good one. It taught me a lot, and I am a better writer for it. It has also produced some incredible talents, including Bud. But never in a million years would I have expected something Bud had written to appear on Hacker News. Those worlds are too far apart, separated by an endless stream of prose, bracketed off by code and semi-colons and syntax errors.
And yet, there he was. On the front page. A collision of worlds.
Tell me what you thought - justin@polluterofminds.com