"...beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler grey. Expanding-- And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard expanding to infinity... And somewhere he was laughing, in a white painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face." - Neuromancer

Ah, after so long, I've rediscovered the Zone. Up coding at 3:30am, music blasting, a little bit drunk but not too much, working on this pesky, broken, ugly code for work, I have an epiphany, and the entire structure of my library falls into place in my head. All the ugliness that I've hated since I started working on it becomes unnecessary, all the data structures are reorganized, all the kludgy double pointers disappear, new calls materialize and old ones fade away...

I haven't really had a good coding moment like this for a long time. I had it all the time in college, but usually the work I do at Sun is bug fixing, testing, minor development, etc. I've been working on this library for months, going through a neverending review process, enduring lots of frustration, working in fits and spurts.. but I've been working on this all day long, top to bottom, reworking and fixing and tuning until I know every single line, and finally my brain chewed up the whole thing, optimized it, and spit it back out.

It's like a freaking head orgasm. This is why I chose this career path, for moments when I get to create like this, where I can point at something and say this is *mine*, I thought of it and reasoned through it and created it with my own mind and my own hands, and got to play digital god.

Now, all I have to do is implement it and hope that the structure shining in my head doesn't fade away. Sleep is for pussies. Let me just find music a little bit more energetic, perhaps some thumping techno... and let me just turn the lights down a little bit and dim the monitors, because the light hurts my eyes... ah. There we go. Back to work.