A Funeral for the Coder

The service isn't in a church. It's at my desk, at 2 a.m., in the glow of a single monitor. The only sound is the clack of mechanical switches. Today, I turn 30. For 18 of those years — two-thirds of my life — I have been a coder. The grief didn't hit all at once. It crept in with every line of auto-generated code that was just... correct. Every tab-completion that finished my thought before I had it. At some point, I stopped writing code and started approving it. I didn't notice the shift until it was already over. Tonight, the room is quiet enough to say goodbye. I am holding a funeral for the craft I spent a lifetime learning. The Kid in me speaks first. He's twelve. He's clutching a worn-out QBasic book to his chest. He doesn't really understand what's happening, but he knows something important is gone. "We learned a secret language," he says. "Not everyone could read it. Not everyone wanted to. But those of us who did — we found each other. We were the ones who stayed up building