Code-fu.

It starts nibbling at you around track 5: he’s building up to something here, but you can’t figure out what it is. It doesn’t focus until halfway through track 6 of CD 1; probably because you’re busy and not really paying much attention to the sonic hints he’s giving.

That’s one thing about trance, though—you have to give the DJ time to work his magic, but when he does, it’s a sublime thing indeed. In this particular case it’s Sasha, the CD is the two-CD set Global Underground: Ibiza, and the code is a random bit of PHP. Start your code when you start song one, and thirty minutes later you’re halfway through track 6, and then the DJ shows his hand and you realize what he’s been getting at for the past thirty minutes. If you’re lucky, that’s the moment when the parse errors melt away, and everything suddenly works. Then you look down and realize you can’t remember how you wrote the code, and that your bare right foot is on top of the subwoofer, keeping time, and that your glasses are going to fall off your nose if you ignore them for one moment longer.

At that point, the phone rings, the cat asks for a quick cuddle, or your spouse has an idea, and the moment’s lost. You pause winamp, save your code, and take a break.

I say I’m not a coder. I’m not; I promise you that much. I’m a wannabe. I can make little things work, and sometimes not even that much. But the excitement of making code work is the same excitement I get from when the words flow properly. It makes up for all the hours I spend when the code doesn’t work.

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