When Life gives you Lemons - A coder's take

Another mind-bender - Oh Boy!! So I don't know why I am being asked these million dollar questions that I have no clue how to unlock. If I ever did wont I be a millionaire in the first place. That elusive bulb never flashes in the inner recesses and I am always left struggling trying to connect the dots. I wonder who at Storylane comes up with these kind of questions. Thanks Michael Landau for throwing this at me anyway.


Life in general mimics a chaotic system driven by the dynamics of skewed events on a routine basis. The events can be painful, unprecedented and sometimes bizarre that can drive you bonkers but they keep sling-shooting those lemons at ya really hard and every time one lands in your lap you are left wondering whether to chuck it back or squeeze the citric juices out of it. Either ways you gotta handle it. As I write this my mind is already voyaging back a decade when I was working on a paper on synchronizing chaotic systems such as Rossler attractors using Fuzzy Logic Controllers and I was just so enamored with the AI stack that it did not dawn on me to draw those corollaries with Life. May be it was not needed at that time. 14 years later I see them linearly overlapping well almost.

Synchronizing life's chaos is certainly not easy although its not difficult either. Those logic controllers are always at play to defuzzify the chaos in your life that gets stirred up your way by the masterful fate. Logic controllers in layman terms are brick-mortared with rules, rules and more rules. So when you start as a kid, your slate is clean, there are no rules but as you come through the ranks you are always establishing a rule-base  on which your future dealings with life will be determined - those rules could be a learning curve, a sad experience that has made you stronger, a knowledge driven exercise that is now in your arsenal to bank on. And on top of if you are spiritualist like me who constantly hones on his mental fortitude by virtue of meditation - the effects are unreal. The mind being a great wanderer is now more in control and can be redirected to focus on pressing issues than  loiter aimlessly forever. The toughest thing in this world is not the most complex algorithm to crack, it is to be able to reign in on your mind to focus, reflect and evaluate the problems that stumble out of your life's closet.

When a coder is assigned an application defect to troubleshoot, he attempts to address it in a very impersonal rationalized way, blanking out all assumptions that might deter his chances. Nothing is taken for granted. Similarly that same coder when solving life's problems will approach it no differently - analyze and debug the issue by sifting through the event logs, look for a pattern of events that he may have experienced in the past, isolate the problem and then either provide a temporary hack to stop the bleeding or work on a long term solution. And yet there will be occasions when the defect intentional or not may impact other stakeholders in the ecosystem created around you - could be a tiff with your colleague at work, a quarrel with your wife on not obliging her with a solitaire or a busted day at work. The chaos that emanates from such aberrations in life needs to be handled the way the coder does with a sense of clarity and calmness. If that defect was your own doing, accept it, fix the issue and move on. Don't let your false hubris come in the way of accepting your fault.

When the problems in life are fatalist in nature like a hurricane ravaged home or a severe accident that is life threatening or a health in tatters - akin to those server crashes from hung threads, transaction rollbacks or deadlocks on the database. But unlike the transaction recovery mechanism on servers, life does not offer any such instant recovery solution  while inflicting those wounds. The rehab journey in such situations could be sapping, debilitating and arduously long. The weak would crash into the abyss never to rise again.  The strong desires to rise again some through nerves of steel others through bundles of jubilant energy and yet a few through rigors of spiritual affiliations and faith-driven investments into that superior Unknown.

The intent here was not to bombard you with technical terms but to present an insight in a different perspective through the lenses of a coder and how he interprets, debugs and squeezes those lemons and gulps up his lemonade cocktail  - and I mean literally :-)