It’s some minutes past 3 am on my smartphone, smart watch and even laptop my three companions that are always by my bedside. Though the laptop is more close to my heart than the rest of them after my road bike parked outside under the staircase.
As a programmer I am never free at any given moment of the day even to take a nap like most of you do. If am not before my laptop staring and fidgeting with some ugly code then am on my smartphone reading some articles or chats by other programmers. Otherwise I would be on the road cycling to the office, to the house or to see a client on my road bike.
Apart from my tasks at work, I have my own tasks which may comprise of my own projects, projects from fellow friends, colleagues at work, or at times referrals. So as I plant my feet on the floor and stand up to go wash my face am wondering what jobs I am to do but rather how many jobs I will be doing on that particular day. This number may increase if one of my clients or my boss for that matter adds me some in the course of the day.
I have set my alarm to always wake me up at around 3 am so that I can enjoy the quietness of the early morning and the abundance of night bundles which am usually awarded as from midnight to 6 am daily. 3 am is just like 4 hours away from the time I jetted to Dreamland.
It is the 12th of September, a day twenty with years ago I made my first cry as I took my first breath of life into this troublesome world (By the way me being a programmer is a profession of solving problems). So as I turn to plant my feet on the floor am aware it is supposed to be my birthday but thinking about the unaccomplished goals and mission my mind drifts away into the work ahead.
Prior to this day I had googled how to disable getting happy birthday wishes on Facebook. So I had changed the privacy of my birthday to only me on Facebook and Twitter so that I don’t get those good for nothing messages. The only place I was not able to do so was on my Safaricom and Airtel subscriber profiles. Oh how I wish I could prevent them from wishing me HBD. Maybe one of these days I will call the customer care to ask them to disable that on my line.
I just feel I have a lot of unaccomplished goals and hence no need to waste resources celebrating a happy birthday. I had planned that by 2020 I should be a cross platform developer from Windows, Android, Linux, MacOs, Windows Phone, Tizen especially for app vSongBook that I started from my student cubicle.
Many people who pledged to support me especially financially and material wise never kept their words from friends, relatives and even developers. With misleading advises and false promises I have never if I am making progress in getting where I want to be. For instance some said I could make a hacktonsh by having a virtual box to run the Mac os, others said I could buy a second hand Apple machine and still make it to appetite. It is through trial and error that I learnt I could not make apps for Apple devices with out proper funds. I had bought a second hand apple machine and tried to set it up for ios development. I even went ahead and bought an appstore developer account like I had done with Android. I learnt the hard way that I needed more recent apple machine for the job and that my machine was way back behind the requirements.
Right now I have a Lenovo Yoga from a friend that I borrowed to use since my HP 630 broke down and it will take time to fix it. As I stare into it dimly lite screen to proceed with what I was doing just before going to sleep I can see myself not where I wanna be. This is why I have not celebrated a birthday for the past three to four years. As I check my email I start to see new emails from LinkedIn, Oh my God, I forgot to turn off the HBD wishes on LI, though on Facebook its all quite. I know by the time I rush to fix it it will still be too late and the messages of HBD will still come in.
“Thanks but nothing to celebrate it with. Am still behind my goals” is the message I have drafted to reply to all those HBD wishes that will be coming in anyhow.
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