My life right now is very weird, in a good way.
First, my life is weird in a good way because I am getting better at programming. I had plans to build this proxy engine. And today around 8 pm I started building a piece of it. And completely that piece completely. And now it's done. It's almost midnight.
Now I have a couple more to build and that will be done. But what's weird is how easy it was. It was too easy. I literally just whipped it up and it was done. It took almost no real effort at all.
When you write a new joke you have to really work on it and hone it and then write a joke. But writing software is the complete opposite. You can and basically are encouraged to write stuff that you can use over and over. So writing new software becomes easier, ironically, the more you write software. Eventually you build up a library of software but unlike books, you don't have to re-read it. You just plug it in. It's plug and play.
I now basically have a library of software that is pretty much plug and play. And now I almost have a proxy engine as well. I could actually set up another one right now and have two.
It is now 11;56 pm. I'll be right back ... it's 12:02 AM. Six minutes. (Note: Update: This is a lie. :-| I'm still working on this now two days later.) Now granted it was super easy because it was an identical webpage structure for the scrape. But still. Even if things are identical and I'm scraping two sections of the same site with identical structures I shouldn't be able to do it in six minutes. But I did (I'm running it manually now to make sure it works). But it's pretty much done (as long as it doesn't break in testing).
That's ludicrous. In order to work out a new joke or new content you have to continuously test it for weeks and the shelf life on it? Who knows? I built this in six minutes. And I'll build another one tomorrow and it shouldn't take very long either. It's ludicrous how quick this stuff is once you build the basics of a scraper.
The compounding nature of software development is amazing. The more you build the more you can use the less you actually HAVE to build. And then you can move onto other things.
I think this will help me greatly with The TOC. I think I should be able to get very far on my own without hiring anybody. I think I should be able to get there alone.
Furthermore what's crazy is last night I went out b/c it was Saturday. And while I was out my server kept working. It kept gathering more proxies while I was out and this morning my proxy engine kept working. Every hour it keeps working and I do nothing and it keeps working. It's amazing.
I literally have an employee that I don't have to feed and pay very little and it keeps working in perpetuity. And it still can do more work.
This is the most exciting part for me. I'm not trading hours for dollars. I'm trading flops, cycles, hopefully in the future for dollars. But that's incredible to me, that now I have this resource that will continue to work with or without me and all I have to do is occasionally monitor it.
It's amazing. I can develop software faster and now it just works without me having to really bother with it. It's incredible.
It almost feels like magic.
Come to think of it, I've never felt this way about comedy. But I do feel this way about software. It is magical. They say that's how you should feel about your life's work. And that's how I feel.
