Marcus closed his laptop at exactly 6 PM, just as he had promised himself he would every day this week. The screen went dark, but the code remained illuminated behind his eyelids-persistent, glowing green text against black. Even as he stood from his desk and stretched, he could still see the function he'd been wrestling with, its logic branching through his mind like creeping ivy.

Not now, he told himself. Work is over.

He made dinner-pasta with store-bought sauce, the same meal he'd eaten three nights running. As the water boiled, his mind wandered back to the memory leak in the application. Maybe if he restructured the garbage collection calls? Or perhaps the issue was in the parent component, not the child. He caught himself drumming his fingers on the counter in the rhythm of typing, each tap a phantom keystroke solving problems that could wait until tomorrow.

His girlfriend called while he ate. Sarah's voice was warm, talking about her day at the veterinary clinic, a difficult surgery on a golden retriever that had gone well. Marcus made appropriate sounds of interest, but part of him was still debugging. Her words became background processes while his main thread analyzed whether implementing a cache would improve the API response time.

"Are you listening?" Sarah asked, not unkindly. She knew the signs.

"Sorry, yes. The dog's owner was crying?" He guessed, poorly.

"That was five minutes ago, Marc."

After the call, he tried to read a novel-something about a detective in Victorian London that his mother had recommended. But the detective's methodology reminded him of debugging: isolating variables, testing hypotheses, following the trail of clues through nested mysteries. Even fiction had become code.

At the gym, counting reps became iterations in a for-loop. One more set translated to one more compile. The rowing machine's display showed metrics that made him think about performance optimization. His heart rate monitor might as well have been displaying server response times.

He met Tom for drinks, his oldest friend who worked in marketing and didn't know a compiler from a cucumber. But when Tom complained about a difficult client presentation, Marcus found himself mentally architecting a solution-a simple web app that could dynamically generate presentations based on client data. He was halfway through explaining the tech stack before he noticed Tom's glazed expression.

"Remember when you used to talk about music?" Tom asked. "You had that whole theory about Radiohead's album structure."

Marcus did remember, vaguely, like recalling a program written in a deprecated language.

That night, he lay in bed, Sarah sleeping beside him. The ceiling was a blank canvas where his mind projected code. He tried counting sheep, but they became objects in an array, each one instantiated with properties: fluffiness, jump_height, sequential_number. He tried meditation, focusing on his breath, but his inhales and exhales became binary: 1, 0, 1, 0.

At 2 AM, he gave up and opened his laptop. The blue light washed over him like baptism, like coming home. The bug that had haunted him all day revealed itself within minutes-a missing await keyword, so simple it was almost insulting. He fixed it, pushed the commit, and felt the sweet release of resolution.

But even as he closed the laptop again, he knew this was just one bug fixed in a system full of them. Tomorrow would bring new problems, and the day after that, and the day after that. The code would follow him home, eat dinner with him, sleep in his bed, wake with him in the morning.

He looked at Sarah, sleeping peacefully, her mind presumably full of dreams that had nothing to do with her work. He envied her ability to close the clinic door and leave the sick animals behind. But then again, maybe she dreamed of surgery, of sutures and symptoms. Maybe everyone carried their own infinite loops.

Marcus finally drifted off around 3 AM, his last conscious thought a promise to himself that tomorrow he would try harder to context-switch, to properly close all his mental tabs. But even as sleep took him, somewhere in his subconscious, a background process continued running, optimizing and refactoring, an endless daemon that would not-could not-terminate.

In his dreams, he was debugging reality itself, and the bug was somewhere in his own source code.

Ethan’s eyes burned as he stared at the ceiling in the dark. It was past midnight, yet his mind churned with lines of code, bug reports, and deadlines. He could hear the faint hum of his laptop from across the room, the machine sleeping-but his brain never did.

He wasn’t in the office. He wasn’t even near his desk. But he might as well have been shackled there. Every time he tried to drift into sleep, a stray thought would pierce through: Did I fix that memory leak? What if the deployment fails tomorrow?

On weekends, when his daughter tugged at his sleeve to play, his body was present, but his mind wandered back to sprint boards and review notes. He’d nod and smile, but she could tell he wasn’t really there. The guilt would come, heavy and sharp, but instead of freeing him, it only chained him tighter.

Work lived in him like a warden. No one forced him to think about it-not his boss, not his colleagues. The prison wasn’t physical. It was a cage built from expectation, ambition, and fear. A cage he carried with him everywhere.

Sometimes, he wondered what silence would feel like. Not the silence of a muted Slack notification, but real silence-the kind that let you hear your own heartbeat without worry pressing against it.

One evening, walking home, he noticed a sparrow land on a fence. It hopped, light and unbothered, and then flew off. He stopped in his tracks, watching it disappear into the sky. For a fleeting second, he envied the bird’s freedom, a freedom he had once believed was his by right.

And in that second, he realized: the keys to his cell weren’t held by his company, or his laptop, or even the endless tasks. They were in his own pocket, hidden beneath the weight of his own unwillingness to set them down.

I recently moved to Windows 11.
I had created only a local account during creation but at some point I configured OneDrive to use my wife's account.
This resulted in her account being bound as the "primary" account of the computer.
This is not what I wanted.

I looked online for a solution but all the instructions I found didn't have the screen I had.
I initially tried a regedit fix but it didn't work.

Here is how I fixed it:

• Go to Settings > Accounts > Your info.
• This is the "weird part", click on "Sign in with a Microsoft account instead".

• Follow the instructions using a different account.
• The previous account will be "detached" from the computer and you will now be using a local account.
• If you go in Settings > Accounts > Email & accounts, you will see that the previous account is still listed under "Accounts used by other apps" but that you can now remove it (which you couldn't do previously).

Hope this helps!

In software development, understanding the difference between being effective and being efficient is crucial for delivering high-quality products.

Effectiveness is about doing the right things - choosing the correct features to implement, solving the right problems, and aligning development efforts with business goals. An effective developer ensures that their work has a meaningful impact and contributes to the project's success.

Efficiency, on the other hand, is about doing things right - optimizing code, reducing resource usage, and minimizing development time. Efficient developers focus on speed and resource management, ensuring that solutions are implemented with minimal waste.

Balancing effectiveness and efficiency leads to better outcomes. For example, writing highly optimized code for a feature that users don't need is efficient but not effective. Conversely, delivering valuable features slowly or with unnecessary complexity may be effective but not efficient.

In summary, successful software development requires both: building the right solutions (effectiveness) and building them well (efficiency).

I have a git repository with 25k commits in it and 7k+ files.

Under Windows 11 using WSL, I noticed that git operations were significantly slower compared to running them natively on Windows.

I have a script that I use to synchronize many branches that was taking forever to execute, but should have been relatively fast.
It also had trouble with line endings which caused issues when merging branches but reminded me of a setting I used to configure in my ~/.gitconfig a very long time ago.

Given that git configuration under Windows and WSL are separate, I had to update the ~/.gitconfig file in my Linux environment with the following.

[core]
    autocrlf = true

This immediately fixed my problem and git was fast again.