When I step back and think about what got me to this point, it had to have been my mom signing me up for a summer camp. It wasn’t a summer camp summer camp; this was one of those 1-2 week long educational summer camps. You give a kid some Mentos and Coke and pretend they’re learning something. This one was about making video games.

I enrolled in the hopes of it being tons of fun. And it was. The games we made were never that complex, but when you’re twelve they don’t have to be. At that age you’re liberated from any preconceived notions of “should,” only knowing the raw possibility of “could.” You’re able to make art of any quality to your own liking. Just the sheer act of creation was enough. And this was how I learned my first programming language, the same first language of many a young nerd: Scratch.1

That summer camp experience was all well and good, but the computer science brain worms didn’t set in until camp ended. I wanted to fiddle around with my projects at home, so I went on my parent’s PC to download the code-editing program myself. But there was no download.

We had been using Scratch on communal laptops. They were wheeled around on a cart and everything. These things had a battery life of about 20 minutes, I’m serious. If you didn’t plug them in within ten seconds of the low battery warning, they’d die. Looking back, it was a miracle they ran that old version of Scratch at all. And that’s what we didn’t know–that it was an older version of Scratch.

This newer Scratch was a fully fleshed-out website, which let you write and publish your programs.

Thousands upon thousands of projects were freely hosted and available for you to play, comment on, and share. Games, songs, animations. It was a beautiful cacophony of creative energy. But the best part was being able to remix. You could poke around the guts of any program you came across, and even edit it as your own. Essentially, every project is open-source. And that was the coolest thing I’d ever heard.

In hindsight, this is obvious GitHub propaganda. It was training my young, impressionable mind for repos and forks. And I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. I would remix every other project I interacted with, and whenever I had the merest whiff of an idea, I would load up a new, blank project.

The number unfinished projects I have on Scratch became a strange point of pride for me. They outnumber my published projects a hundred to one (and I’m only half-joking). This habit would continue well throughout my educational career as a programmer.

I had a CS professor who told us the importance of GitHub as a potential software engineer. It’s as good as a résumé. And you don’t leave random garbage on your résumé, do you? So that night, I privated all of my miscellaneous repos. My profile is still squeaky clean.

But unfinished projects aren’t the only thing private. I also keep some creative writing and my coursework in private repos, in accordance with my alma mater’s course policy. Other students haven’t gotten the memo, so fully workable code solutions to big projects (even ones from Red 402) are freely available online.

But why am I going on and on about this?

I wouldn’t be a computer scientist if I wasn’t concerned about performance, in this case the performance of the individual. In an age driven by visibility, it’s far too easy to see the best of the best and their performance and forget what the average person does and goes through. This high-schooler draws better than DaVinci. This middle-schooler writes like Herman Melville. This six-year-old can shred Van Halen.

These people are, with all due love and respect, not normal.

Most people are not like this. These people are the exception, not the rule. And yet once we see the ceiling, we can’t help but feel how close we are to the floor. But they didn’t become so talented outta nowhere. Watch a YouTube Short or Instagram Reel or TikTok TikTok of an artist doing their thing, and you only see their success. You don’t see the countless hours labored, hearts broken, effort spent. This is part of the problem of short-form content. (Read Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death for more about the form of media affecting our expectations and perceptions.)

Coding is the same. I’m not going to be so bold as to equate it to a creative endeavor, not here at least. But coding should be seen as creative to an extent. And like all creative endeavors, it should celebrate failure, embrace it. Failure is how we progress, how we learn. Isn’t “Move Fast and Break Things” Silicon Valley’s whole ethos?

This brings me to my latest innovation: the curriculum mortis, or CM for short.

For some reason, I thought the curriculum vitae was named as such because it was a collection of “living projects.” In hindsight, I have no idea what that was supposed to mean. Actively maintained and updated? I doubt most items on most CVs satisfy that requirement. In reality curriculum vitae translates to “course of (one’s) life.” So a curriculum mortis would be a “course of (one’s) death,” assuming I got my Latin declensions right.3

In other words, a graveyard of ideas.

I also thought “curriculum vitae” was another way of saying “living document.” And in a sense, a CV is a living document; you will keep on doing more and more things, and you’ll keep updating your CV to reflect that. Ironically enough, a CM is also a living document. You’ll continuously have ideas that go nowhere. Duds. Bombs. Nothingburgers.

But it’s also a living document in the sense that these projects can be brought back to life. Ideas never truly die. They rest, and eventually are woken again. If not by you, then by someone else. Even scraps, leftovers can be revitalized. Anne Carson, recipient of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, translated the fragments left of the Greek poet Sappho in If Not, Winter and used these limitations to her advantage; there is no other poetry like it.

That sort of creativity can only be achieved by embracing failure and ruin.4

That’s the dual purpose of the CM. You could treat it like a to-do list, all the things you wish to one day return to. Or you could be like twelve-year-old me, reveling in ruin, proud of what he had not yet done. Look upon my work, ye Mighty, and despair! For nothing beside remains.

Happy Halloween!5

𓇼 ⋆.˚ 𓆉 𓆝 𓆡⋆.˚ 𓇼

  1. My first real programming language was sadly Java, but let’s not get into that. ↩

  2. The nickname given to the Tufts class “Machine Structure and Assembly Language Programming,” CS 40 (previously COMP 40).6 It comes from the amount of anguish and violent rage inflicted upon the students. ↩

  3. You could sum up all of a programmer’s body of humor into two great works: Monty Python and xkcd. And if you don’t believe me, the language Python was named after Monty Python. ↩

  4. Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals and Four Thousand Weeks speak of this. ↩

  5. A bit rushed and not my best work, but I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless. ↩

  6. I’m kidding, nobody calls it that. But they should. ↩