A Year of Hermit Hacking

A talk by Pamela Fox, from Ignite Foo 2012.

Transcript

1. Heyaz, I'm Pamela. About 2 years ago, I was working for Google and I was in love with it. I was working on Google Wave and their APIs and throwing my heart and soul into the project.
2. One morning, this big important exec dude came over the VC and told us that Google Wave was no more. I was young and naive and I thought that projects were forever- I was heartbroken. I couldn't stay at Google anymore because I thought to myself that anything I worked on, they could kill one day.
3. So I said f i ne, I won't work for this company or any company. I'll be a free-range developer, hacking in the grass. If anyone kills something, it will be me. But f i rst, I needed a place to hack.
4. So I thought I'd start with the obvious: work from home. I'd have home-cooked meals, adorable cats to pet whenever, and I wouldn't have a commute down the nasty San Francisco streets that are perpetually under construction.
5. But then there's the actual reality of working from home. When I'd see my kitchen, I'd think to myself that I should probably make some vegetable stock, stick some kale chips in the dehydrator, slow-cook some pork...and pretty soon I have timers going off every 10 minutes, and I haven't managed to code anything.
6. Plus, my formerly adorable cats decide that my laptop is the warmest seat in the house and do anything they can to take their nap on the keyboard - and when I'm programming interpreted languages like Python or JavaScript, a napping cat on my keyboard means constant syntax errors. And when I'm banging my head against an error, it's just way too easy for me to f i nd myself in the living room watching a Glee marathon.
7. So when I realized I just couldn't do the work from home thing, I f i gured I'd try the cafe. I could pay just a few bucks for a bottomless cup of tea, I could people-watch the hipster nerds, and I could eavesdrop on people brainstorming the next big startup (and code it up while they were talking :).
8. But then there's the reality. First, cafes weren't designed for hackers, and they have limited outlets. These are actual maps of the 3 cafes nearest to me, with markers for the outlets and best seats near them. So you have to know the locations, and you have to be the f i rst one to get to them.
9. At this one Starbucks, I was always competing with this homeless guy for the outlet seat. Now, when the homeless guy got the seat, I was pretty much out of luck for the whole day - cuz homeless guys don't really have anywhere to go, they're quite happy to sleep all day. The employees at that Starbucks always gave me my drinks for free, and I think that's because they thought I classed up the joint when I was actually able to get the seat.
10. But, let's say I actually get a good seat and I set myself up with my laptop, my charger, my mobile testing devices and USB cords...and then I realize I really need to go to the bathroom. I sit there staring at the bathroom, fantasizing about how amazing it would be, putting it off until the very last possible minute.
11. When I realized I didn't have the bladder for cafe life, I decided to try co-working. There would be outlets everywhere, free WiFi, unlimited tea, toilets galore, and people!
12. So I joined a space thinking that there were all these people around for me to talk to. I started talking to them and found one was a geologist, one that was a wikipedia ghost writer. One was an author of an advice book on sex -- for people over 50, so not so useful for me. I also found multiple life coaches, a job that I didn't even know existed.
13. They all had interesting jobs, but I didn't really know what to talk about with them every day. We had very different goals in life and ways of getting there. When I wanted to rant or rave about something during the day, I found it much easier to “talk” to Twitter.
14. But hey, I told myself, we're all adults and we have this default way of talking to each other no matter what – drinking! The co-working space held a happy hour every Friday to enable that form of stranger socialization.
15. I had 2 problems with it. 1) It was at 4pm, which is apparently my productivity peak and the moment that I'm always just about to deploy. 2) I was actually working on a nutrition-tracking tool at the time, so it'd just be a little weird for me to join them in binge drinking while deploying my nutrition app, right?
16. At the end of nearly a year in the space, I had the sudden realization that I was surrounded by strangers - people I didn't really know or particularly want to know. I felt more alone at the co-working space than I did at the cafes and my apartment.
17. I was so sad with this realization that I couldn't hang around anyone that had colleagues, because I would just get so jealous that they had someone to banter with during their workday.
18. So over the course of this year of hermit hacking, I f i gured out what's most important to me. First, I really need the freedom to pee whenever I feel like it.
19. But equally important, I need to be around other people. Not just arbitrary people that happen to work in the same vincinity as me, but people that are driven by the same passions as me and working towards the same end goal.
20. Now I'm starting to think that it's time to join a company again. Sure, I would lose a little bit of control over what I'm working on, but I would gain the privilege of a community of colleagues - and now I know how important that is to me.