Goodbye Flow State

I learned to program the way a lot of people did: I locked myself in a room one summer and didn’t come out until I’d built a video game . It was a bad video game. But somewhere in those weeks I lost track of time for the first time in my life: debugging, reasoning, rethinking, discovering… Psychologists call it flow. It was always rare for me. A few colleagues over the years seemed to drop into it…