Picture this: It’s 2 AM on a Tuesday, I’m three energy drinks deep into what I lovingly call my “midnight coding marathon,” and I’m finally about to crack the bug that’s been haunting my dreams for the past week. My fingers are dancing across the keyboard like a caffeinated pianist, Stack Overflow tabs are multiplying faster than rabbits, and I’m pretty sure I’ve achieved that mythical state of “flow” that all programmers chase like digital unicorns.
Then the universe decided to teach me a lesson.
Click.
Complete. Absolute. Darkness.
Not the kind of dramatic darkness you see in movies where there’s still somehow perfect lighting on the protagonist’s face. No, this was the real deal – the kind of darkness that makes you question whether you still have eyeballs or if they’ve just given up entirely.
The Panic Phase (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My UPS)
My first thought wasn’t about the brilliant code I’d just lost (because naturally, I hadn’t saved in the last 20 minutes who does that?). It wasn’t about the impending deadline. It wasn’t even about the fact that my laptop battery had exactly 47 minutes of life left.
No, my first thought was: “Did I just witness the heat death of the universe?”
After fumbling around in the dark like a confused bat, I finally located my phone’s flashlight and discovered that yes, the world still existed, but no, the power grid apparently didn’t want to participate in my late night coding session anymore.
The power company’s automated message cheerfully informed me that restoration was expected “sometime between now and the heat death of the universe” okay, they actually said “6-8 hours,” but when you’re a programmer on a deadline, those are basically the same thing.
The Withdrawal Stage
You know that moment when you realize just how utterly dependent you are on electricity? I’m not talking about the big stuff like refrigeration or heating. I’m talking about the soul crushing realization that your entire existence revolves around glowing rectangles of various sizes.
No laptop. No desktop. No monitors. No router. No WiFi. No Stack Overflow. No GitHub. No coffee machine (the real tragedy here).
I sat in my dark apartment, holding my slowly dying laptop like it was a wounded bird, and had what I can only describe as an existential crisis. Who was I without my VS Code? What was my purpose without syntax highlighting? How does one even think without autocomplete?
I briefly considered going to bed like a normal human being, but let’s be honest , what programmer has ever made a reasonable decision at 2 AM?
The Paper Revolution
That’s when I spotted it, sitting innocently on my desk: a notebook. An actual, physical, analog notebook with paper pages and everything. I vaguely remembered buying it during a particularly optimistic moment when I thought I might become one of those organized people who writes things down by hand.
With my laptop’s dying light as a makeshift candle, I opened that notebook and did something I hadn’t done since college: I started coding with a pen.
And you know what? It was absolutely terrible.
My handwriting looked like a spider had fallen into an ink well and decided to interpretive dance its way across the page. I kept trying to Ctrl+Z my mistakes. I actually reached for a mouse that wasn’t there. Twice!!!.
But something magical happened as I continued. Without the safety net of autocomplete, I had to actually remember function names. Without syntax highlighting, I had to truly understand the structure of my code. Without the ability to immediately test every single line, I had to think through the logic completely before writing it down.
The Great Enlightenment (With Terrible Handwriting)
As the hours crawled by and my laptop finally gave up the ghost (rest in peace, little battery icon), I found myself doing something unprecedented: I was actually planning my code.
I drew diagrams that looked like abstract art but somehow made perfect sense to me. I traced through algorithms step by step, catching logical errors that my IDE would never have warned me about. I even and this is embarrassing to admit, I even wrote comments that were actually helpful instead of gems like “// this does the thing” or “// TODO: figure out what this does.”
By dawn, I had filled twelve pages with what could generously be called “code” and more accurately be described as “hieroglyphics that might theoretically compile in some parallel universe where my handwriting is legible.”
But here’s the kicker: it was good code. Really good code. Not just good in the “it works” sense, but good in the “I actually understand what every single line does and why it needs to be there” sense.
The Return of the Electrons
When the power finally flickered back to life (accompanied by the beautiful choir of every electronic device in my apartment beeping simultaneously), I expected to just type up my handwritten code and call it a day.
Instead, I found myself doing something different. I took my time. I considered each line before typing it. I wrote actual comments. I thought about edge cases. I even brace yourself – I even wrote unit tests before implementing the functions.
I know, I know. Who was I and what had I done with the real me?
The code I eventually submitted wasn’t just functional; it was elegant. It was readable. It was the kind of code that future me would actually thank present me for writing instead of cursing my ancestors.
The Lessons from the Dark Side
This power outage taught me more about programming in one night than some bootcamps teach in twelve weeks. Here’s what I learned:
Thinking is faster than typing. When you can’t immediately test every little change, you’re forced to think through the entire solution in your head first. This mental modeling makes you a better problem solver and helps you catch issues before they become bugs.
Constraints breed creativity. Without access to Google, Stack Overflow, and my usual collection of code snippets, I had to actually understand the underlying concepts. No more copy paste programming, I had to think from first principles.
Comments are love letters to your future self. When you’re writing code by hand, you naturally write more descriptive variable names and better comments because you know you won’t remember what “x2” does when you come back to it later.
Planning prevents poor performance. Without the ability to quickly iterate and test, I was forced to plan the entire solution architecture upfront. This led to better organized, more maintainable code.
The New Me (Still Terrible at Handwriting)
These days, I still code with electricity (I’m not a masochist), but I’ve incorporated some analog practices into my digital workflow. I keep a notebook next to my keyboard for sketching out complex problems. I force myself to think through solutions completely before opening my IDE. I even occasionally write code comments by hand first to make sure they actually make sense.
My colleagues think I’ve lost my mind when they see me scribbling diagrams in meetings, but my code reviews have gotten significantly shorter, and my bugs have gotten significantly fewer.
The Moral of the Story
Sometimes the best way to move forward in the digital world is to take a step back into the analog one. Sometimes the most high-tech solution is a low tech approach. Sometimes the best IDE is a pen and paper and your own brain.
And sometimes, the universe has to literally pull the plug on your productivity to teach you how to be truly productive.
Also, invest in a UPS. Seriously. Your future self will thank you when the lights go out again.
Because they will go out again. The universe has a sense of humor like that.
P.S. – I still haven’t figured out how to do syntax highlighting with a pen. If anyone has suggestions, my DMs are open.
