I love computing. I’m somewhat of a computing romantic, even. The history of computer is so rich, and so stimulating.

Fuzzy string matching is a problem not unique to computers and internet. It’s a important problem in Bioinformatics where edit distances are used for DNA Sequence Alignment that help determine how similar two organisms are from a functional or evolutionary point of view. I learnt this because I recently went down a rabbit hole of fzf and its applications which led me to another implementation called fzy and it explains how the two tools differ algorithmically.

Scientists say human DNA sequence is about 60% similar to Bananas (there’s nuance to this, don’t take it at face value). Some form of fzf was used to reach this conclusion. How amazing is that?

The jaded and unenthusiastic around me get bored “talking shop” in social settings. And it irks me. Then there are the worse kinds, who have a singular absolutist mindset that people in tech are just grinding away to make someone else rich. These are people who are themselves employed in tech. I find it sad that they’ve chosen to spend a third of their day for the rest of their lives doing something they don’t enjoy. Some of these folks aren’t bad engineers, and they manage to get by. But they are absolutely blind to the beauty of computing.

I don’t think my perspective of finding beauty in computing is any different from finding beauty in nature. Computing is part of nature, in fact. Just that being vocal about it you get weird looks and you may be “boring the hell out of them”. I find it best to stay away from these so called engineers. They wax poetic about “life is more than your job” and while that’s true, they don’t have anything interesting to talk about. Their discourse only seeks to fill the silence.