The Thing About Computers…

Before we get to real saving and loading, you and I need to talk about something. Something important. It’s about computers. The thing about computers—desktops, laptops, cell phones, you name it—is that, well, they suck. This is not by nature, mind you—it isn’t intrinsic—and I yearn for the day when they won’t suck. But for the moment, by (poor) design, they do. This is most powerfully seen when your computer loses a bunch of your information.

A few years back I was working on a project (thankfully I was the only one on the project at the time). To make a long story short, I dropped the database. All of the information in the database—gone. The very structure of the database (which was itself days and days of work for me)—gone. It was all just gone. It felt like Scotty had beamed up my stomach but forgot the rest of me. I walked around for several hours, just feeling sick, not punching things that would certainly have injured my hand, muttering, “I can’t believe I dropped the database….” It was horrible. You know how I did it? It was a mouse-click about 15 pixels too high, followed by a totally reflexive (at that point) hitting of the OK button on the confirmation pop-up. And it was all gone.

User error, you say? Yeah, I suppose it was. I certainly blamed myself. But at some point you have to ask yourself, why is it so fast and so easy to screw things up so catastrophically? At some point you have to start blaming the computer.

Anyway, I’m telling you this because now that your programs can actually do something, it means they can do something bad. Now you have to be careful. Make backups. Make them on different computers if you can. Look into source code management systems. (I use Mercurial, and I love it.) I tend to favor things like Gmail, where I can use it from any machine (just in case my main computer melts…it happened once, with actual melting) and where it’s someone else’s job to make sure I don’t lose anything important.

From this point on, just be careful, OK?