I haven’t used any Microsoft product since I came to the US. I fleetingly toyed with the idea of using Windows 10 but having seen the glory days of Windows 98 I just could not tolerate this monstrosity.

I stumbled upon this article about the silent resurgence of Microsoft as the world’s most valuable company and the article for some reason made me a tad bit happy.

Growing up in India, Apple was not a concept I was even vaguely aware of. I used to code, as a kid, in Turbo C on a Windows 95 machine and used to love its color palette of fluorescent blue and white and sick yellow blinding me on my CRT monitor. I would code in MS-DOS as needed and have very fond memories of clip-art and Clippy. I even enjoyed watching the screensavers of Windows logos flying at you and the pipe mazes and the gloriously mysterious teapot, it was nothing short of magic. This was before the days of the internet (in India) when you had to learn to code by reading books.

I never consciously thought about it before reading the article, but Windows has always been a by-a-nerd-for-a-nerd operating system. In some ways even more so than Linux. Linux might need more computer knowledge to work with but it is pretty hip, or at least it used to be in the days when FOSS was nascent and we would compete with installing the most efficient distros comparing the bootup times of our Gentoos and debating about the pros and cons of Gnome vs KDE. There were never any debates about Windows, nobody was ever excited when a newer version was released (Windows peaked at 98), nobody was ever on its side.

And yet we all had dual booted Windows, even the very serious coders. It had one feature though that every other Linux system lacked - no matter what model laptop you had or what graphics card you had installed - everything always worked (what’s a handful of BSOD’s in the grand scheme of things).

I am very glad to read that Windows (rather Microsoft) has made peace with its nerd identity. There is something dignified, respectable, and grown-up about it, especially today.

This brings me to me. Of late, I have also made peace with the fact that I enjoy coding for fun, but I do not give a rat’s ass about compilers or kernels or apps or softwares or algorithms or efficiency or runtime or any of that. I love coding for the aesthetics. I have always loved the aesthetics. In college, I used MS-paint and basic Javascript to design a webpage that looked like the Matrix. I made a Winamp plugin on Visual Studio because I loved to see those dancing colors, even though I rarely ever listen to music. None of these were useful of course, and I absolutely loved making them.

I spent the entire day today reorganizing and restructuring my laptop and my websites and my various cloud backups and my various websites and my various symlinks. Unfortunately, much like the math I do, it’s very hard to share this abstract joy with others, it can only be experienced by doing and contemplating and immersing yourself. I’m especially proud of my website. I restructured everything and learned some rudimentary Gulp so that I no longer have to track changes manually. It even allows me to break my .html files into small modules, one of my childhood dreams. My next goal is to figure out how to create a pipeline for my LaTeX and to restructure and properly document my Hugo theme.

I’m sure the Japanese have a word for this kind of happiness. I’ve probably pulled a Marie Kondo on my workspace.

Much like Microsoft, I’m rediscovering the nerd inside me, and I am very happy and content with it. It’s like meeting an old friend and realizing that you are still best buds :)