No One Stopped Me (Story of My Life)

huI arrived at Belgrade’s Sava Centar completely uncaffeinated, wearing a black T-shirt, jeans and a black hoodie. I’d briefly considered a maroon t-shirt but dismissed it as too exciting. To make up for my lack of daring, I used up a trial perfume vial called Wolf’s Heart, as if that would magically give me Wolf of Wall Street vibes. (Spoiler: It would not. I am short and plump and have pink streaks in my hair. My vibe is more My Pretty Pony than Wolf of Wall Street.)

I was there to take part in a 48-hour software sprint. I am not a software developer. I learned to program in LISP at university, which has given me a life-long horror of unclosed parentheticals but not much in the way of practical relevance. I was not going to develop the latest greatest app.

For reasons that I don’t think I can adequately explain, I thought it was a great idea to attend and write fiction instead of code. Short stories, written during the event, inspired by being trapped in a convention hall for 48 hours.

I spent most of the two days and nights surrounded by unnervingly clever young men and women working in intense little teams, competing for 60,000 euros in prizes and the right to feel superior forever. I just wanted to finish something that I could share, out of a vague sense of professional pride and the sharp reality that I’d paid 100 euros for a wristband and a place at the table, which would only be refunded if I submitted a valid project. Valid was doing a lot of heavy lifting, here.

I lived on whatever they put out on the conference buffet table. I left the venue around midnight and got up again at 4am: a triumph of insomnia over common sense.

I wrote directly into a GitHub repository. I needed to prove that the stories had happened here. This is what passes for a paper trail in 2020’s performance art.

I challenged myself to include event sponsors in the stories.

I wrote one story tucked inside a code template—like an awkward guest at a party who pretends to be furniture. It was meant to look like an app, something useful. It wasn’t. It was a heartbroken letter to an ex, passive-aggressively formatted as software. I called it Breakup as a Service. It was terrible. No one asked me to do this. No one stopped me.

Another was an intentionally ridiculous letter written by a software sprint participant who’s absolutely certain that moving chairs and offering “positive energy” makes them integral to a team that hasn’t noticed them.

It was very meta.  Once we submitted our projects, we had to give a five-minute pitch to demo our apps to the judges. My demo, I decided, would be to read this story aloud. I have done a lot of readings. I was pretty sure this would take about four minutes, leaving me one minute to introduce myself and explain what I was doing and why. If I spoke quickly, I might even be able to get ten seconds on the importance of fiction in tech.

But first, I had to submit something. Other contestants were unveiling apps with sleek GUIs and cinematic demo reels. I created a pretty PDF of five stories that I declared to be completed — another word doing some very heavy lifting, here — and a page of completely pointless project metrics.

• Stories started: 9

• Stories finished: 5

• Words written: ~9,000

• Useful words written: 2,607

• Existential crises: 2.5

• Coffee: insufficient

• Steps (mostly pacing around the Convention Center): 23,248

• Meaningful glances from judges: 3 (estimated, unreliable)

• Internal monologues spiraled through: 7

• GitHub commits: 71

• GitHub commit messages including profanity: 3

On the last night, I learned that the demo video was not a suggestion but a requirement. I retreated to my accommodation sleep-deprived and muttering. After a few hours of fitful rest, I filmed myself leafing through the PDF while sounding like I was slowly disintegrating.

I submitted it with fifteen minutes to spare.

Then came the panic. I was supposed to pitch this whole thing, like a real product. I needed an introductory statement. I needed to rehearse reading the story. I probably should have PowerPoint slides but there was definitely no time for that. Somehow, I had to explain my art to a crowd who were expecting to check if my code would compile.

The easy first step was to practice my story so that I would know how long it took to read. Before I began, I glanced at the official Discord channel. My heart sank. The judging would start an hour after submission deadline, it said. I’d already blown half of that spiraling. They linked a pitch spreadsheet with all the teams. I was 7th. I grabbed my stuff and ran to the convention center, arriving at five past.

The spreadsheet showed team number three as “in the room”, which I took to mean pitching, giving me twenty glorious minutes to grab a pastry and cobble together an intro. But then the status line vanished. I abandoned the coffee queue and marched up to the desk in front of the conference hall to ask how I’d know when it was me.

They scanned the spreadsheet and told me I should just go in and wait my turn. Right. No pastry, no coffee, no prep. But at least I’d get to hear other people’s pitches and work out what I was supposedly meant to be doing.

I walked in to find clusters of people all over the room. Some were sitting at small tables facing the wall. A small crowd huddled near the stage; I assumed the currently pitching team. Someone tapped me on the shoulder and whispered the format: I had five minutes to speak. She’d wave when my time was up so that we could have three minutes for the Q&A. I nodded and asked in a whisper where I should sit.  She pointed to a table where two men were engrossed in their laptops. There wasn’t much room but I sat down across from them, pulling out my notebook. I settled in. I smiled politely at the two men across from me. One, a friendly looking man with a thick beard, smiled back. The other never looked up. I leafed through my scribbled pages and began rooting around in my pockets for my pen.

About ninety seconds passed before the friendly one with the beard looked at me and spoke at full volume, as if we weren’t in a room full of people nervously pitching their projects.

“So,” he said.

Rude, I thought.

 A brief pause and he continued.  “Do you want to start?”

I blinked and then froze in horror. “Is this my pitch session?”

Both stared at me and nodded. Yes. Yes, it was.

 I opened my mouth and closed it again, hoping the floor might swallow me whole. I mumbled something incoherent about fiction before closing my mouth again firmly. FriendlyBeardGuy asked me if I had a Github Repo. I did! I spelled out the repo name and they each pulled it up on their laptops and began rummaging through my files. My moment of relief melted away: This was exactly the wrong place to start.

I tried to explain that the repo was full of stories. They looked up from their laptops and then down again.

Mr Serious broke the silence. “So you have no code?”

A tiny shake of my head.

“Is there an app?”

Another tiny shake.

He glanced at his screen, as if retracing the steps that had led him here.  He looked like a man who’d arrived at the wrong meeting, the wrong building, possibly the wrong profession, but was too polite to say “What the hell is this?”

I stared at the floor as I explained that I was going to read them a story.

Heavy silence, as if I were a cat offering them a dead bird.

I fumbled for my phone to find the file, which I had not yet actually ever read aloud. I tripped over the title like it was a loose paving stone. Both men stared at my Github repo as if a user manual might appear.  I took a deep breath and read the next line, where the story was addressed to the judging committee. FriendlyBeardGuy looked up, puzzled. Was I talking to him?

At least he was listening.  I kept going, half hoping the floor would reconsider.

As I got to the bit about the participant wiping the whiteboard that no one had used, Mr Serious glitched, his face shifting into something that might have been a smile. That tiny spark was all I needed. I kept reading, my confidence growing. The woman from the start walked over, hovering behind the men. She held out a flat hand, lifting it up and down. I stopped, stared at her in confusion. She made a wavey motion.

Oh shit. I was reading competently, finally, which meant that I was using a public reading voice for a room full of people. My outdoor voice, my mother would call it, while other people were in there doing their own pitches, probably wondering what the hell was wrong with me. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to be so loud.”

“No, no,” she said, looking almost as confused as my judges. “Just your five minutes are up.”

That’s it? I looked at her and then at the men. This was the signal for the three-minute Q&A, a nightmare from which I might never recover. Maybe one of the questions would be “How does the story end?”

FriendlyBeardGuy smiled at me the way you smile at someone having a psychotic episode and said, “Don’t worry” in a soothing voice. I took this to mean I should keep reading. Somehow, I made it to the end of the story. “Thank you,” I said in a gravelly voice.

Both of them stared at the middle distance without a word. I could only have made this worse by offering to tell the whole story in interpretive dance. The floor beneath me remained disappointingly solid.

Mr Serious lifted his laptop and turned it towards me, showing me my repo. “I found code,” he said.

Breakup as a Service glowed on the screen.  I gritted my teeth and attempted to speak through them. “It’s a story about a guy who is trying to use code templates to write software but he’s lying to himself and really just writing to his ex-girlfriend.”

This did not help to clear things up.

He scrolled through the file. “So, this won’t run?”

“No.” Right now, this was the only thing that I was confident on. “It’s pure vibe coding. I wrote it with AI. I showed it to a dev friend to check the syntax but he refused.”

FriendlyBeardGuy nodded in sympathy with my unknown friend.

”There’s a PDF,” I said. “Of all the stories. That’s probably easier to read than the Github repo.” They both nodded pleasantly. They were never going to read the PDF.

”That was a very enjoyable story to hear,” said FriendlyBeardGuy. We were finished.

I stumbled out and started laughing. Someone turned to stare but after the last ten minutes, it barely even registered.

It was over.

At least for me. Mr Serious was probably still staring at my code, hoping it would eventually explain itself.

In that regard, he and I had a lot in common.