Have you ever looked back at something you wrote more than a few years ago and thought that it looked more like the work of a complete stranger?
This keeps happening to me; mostly it will be when I have to maintain a bit of code that I wrote a long time ago; sometimes I look at it and cringe at the crude way it works, but quite often I look at it and wonder how it is that I was able to work out how to do it; even the comments read as if they were written by someone else.
The Mangetout of ten years past, even though I still have his scars, some of his tastes and even a few of his clothes, is often like a complete stranger to me.
Yep. Except for me, the cut-off is even quicker. Hell, I don’t even assume I’m the same person from hour to hour. Most of my notes to myself are written in second person and from the perspective of someone who thinks the addressee is a total and complete half-wit.
Seriously, I’ve done any number of things in the past that I’m still in denial that I’m capable of. Two hour presentations, for example. I can’t believe I have enough to say about anything that I could possibly squeeze two hours of time out of, yet I’ve done it and easily.
Took a couple of bites to make sense of that.
I’ve come across things that I’d nearly forgotten I ever did: Pictures from a life drawing class (strewth! not bad), tapes of songs I’d forgotten I’d written, college notes from when I could do calculus(!).
I haven’t done anything artistic in the last fifteen years, maths these days is Boolean.
Who the heck was that guy?