The screenager

I was born at midnight on 1 January 2000: the exact moment every computer on Earth was supposed to stop working. We’d all been warned for years. Planes would fall out of the sky. Banks would forget everyone’s money. Lifts would stop between floors, forever.

None of it happened. The computers just carried on, slightly embarrassed, and in the confusion somebody left a baby in a cardboard box beside one of them. The box said this way up, and it was upside down, which should have told everyone something.

The monitor had been left on. Nobody ever turned it off, so that is how I grew up: in the glow of a beige CRT that hummed, ran warm and went black now and then for no reason anyone could find. I called her Mum.

My first word was “OK”, because OK was the button that made the boxes go away. I clicked it every time, without reading what the box said. I still do. Statistically, so do you.

Other children learned to read from books about hungry caterpillars. I learned from dialog boxes. By four I could read “An error has occurred”. By five I could read “An unexpected error has occurred”, and I spent most of being six wondering who had been expecting the other ones.

I learned to count from a progress bar. It went one, two, three, very quickly up to ninety-nine, and then it stayed at ninety-nine for longer than all the other numbers put together. My teacher said that isn’t how numbers work. The progress bar and I knew better.

School went fine. My report card said I was “bright, but talks to a duck”, which was fair. The duck came free with a bath. I explained every problem I had to it, out loud, from the beginning, and somewhere around the middle I’d hear myself say the answer.

The duck has been with me ever since. It is the best senior engineer I have ever worked with. It listens to the whole problem, never interrupts, and has never once asked if I’ve tried turning it off and on again.

When I was eight, a relative’s printer stopped working. I walked over to it, it saw me, and it started working again. I want to be very clear that I did nothing. I touched nothing. I’m not sure I blinked.

It didn’t matter. The news went round the family faster than a good-morning message on the family group chat, and by the next festival there was a queue. An uncle whose phone was “full”. An aunt whose laptop “had the internet on it”, and she wanted it off. A grandmother with a remote that only worked pointed at the ceiling. A cousin who’d forgotten his password and wanted me to guess it, which I did, first try, because it was his name and 123.

According to my extended family I am now “in computers”, and I’ve stopped arguing. For the record, nobody fixes printers. Printers are not fixed. They are appeased, and they remember.

At twelve I found the setting that turns everything dark, and I’ve lived there ever since. My eyes adjusted. My soul adjusted. My family say I adjusted a bit too much.

Mostly it’s fine. But every few weeks, at about two in the morning, I click a link and a website that doesn’t believe in dark mode opens at full brightness, pure white, like a fridge door in a dark kitchen, and I make a noise I’m not proud of.

This site has a light theme too, behind the button in the corner.true I’m told it’s lovely. I have never seen it.

At eighteen I moved into a hostel with three hundred other people and one wifi router. It lived on top of a cupboard in the warden’s office, and as far as any of us could tell it was the only god. None of us knew the password. We knew someone who knew someone who did. Faith, basically.

It was fast at exactly one time of day: three in the morning, when everyone else was asleep. So I stopped sleeping. My best work, my worst code and nearly all my instant noodles happened between three and five, up on the roof, where if you held your laptop over your head and stood on one leg you got two bars.

The rooftops in the header of the home page are those roofs.true Saturn wasn’t there. We could barely see the moon. But it’s my header.

Then I found competitive programming: a sport where you solve puzzles against the clock, submit your answer, and a machine tells you, in under a second, in front of thousands of strangers, that you’re wrong. People do this on purpose. At weekends.

The machine’s favourite thing to say is “Wrong answer on test 2”. Test 1 is the example in the problem, and you passed it. Test 2 is the first one they didn’t show you, and it is where every dream I’ve ever had has gone to die. I’ve fought it for years. I’ve beaten it a few times. It always comes back, because test 2 was never the problem. It’s my off-by-one error, wearing a costume.

My Codeforces rating peaked at 1414, specialist, over 44 rated rounds.true The graph looks like the heart monitor of someone watching a horror film. I also made it to the ICPC regionals,true where three people share one computer for five hours, and I learned that they shouldn’t.

Somewhere along the way I started building things to find out how they work, and I never managed to pick a lane. Whatever I’m curious about that week gets built, gets half-finished, and gets replaced by whatever I’m curious about the week after. I don’t have a speciality. I have a browser history. I can tell you, from experience, that a distributed system is an ordinary bug that happens on five computers at once, each with a log proving it was another one’s fault.

I’ve had a patch merged into npm.true npm is the tool that, when you ask it for one small library, downloads that library, its three hundred friends and a meaningful fraction of the internet into a folder called node_modules. Astronomers rank the heaviest objects in the universe as: the Sun, a neutron star, a black hole, and node_modules. My patch didn’t move it down the list. Nothing will.

Then I built this website, to write things down once they finally make sense.true It has a night sky in the header that’s painted fresh when you arrive,true a meadow in the footer with its own seasons, rabbits and foxes,true and, behind a button in that header, a music video about taking things apart, every frame of it drawn in code.true

I spent weeks on the footer. Weeks. Most people never scroll that far, which is fair, because footers are where links go to retire. If you have been down there and met the rabbits, you’re one of very few people who have, and I think about you often.

This is the least exciting chapter, and the only one stamped nearly all the way through. I’m as disappointed as you are.

I still live in the glow of a screen. Mum retired years ago, to an electronics recycling yard outside the city, and I visit when I can. She doesn’t turn on any more. But when I tap the glass there’s a crackle of static, and I like to think that’s her saying hello, and not, as the staff keep telling me, a safety issue.

My phone sends me a report every Sunday saying my screen time is up 12% on last week. It has said that every week for six years. Compounded, that comes to about nine quadrillion hours a day, which feels right, given the name.