On Your Mark

Nothing beats high school when it comes to the most memorable moments we share in life. It contributed a lot in shaping who we are now. There, we made friends to have a shoulder to cry on over our adolescent problems that we thought would be too much for us to take, yet were just incomparable to what we’re dealing with now in our present days. Admit it, we missed everything we did in highschool. Even though not all were good. It’s our high school friends who made those so special. So why the fear of reuniting with them? I asked myself this just days ago, before I came home to my hometown to see them. “Am I still their friend?” I know, it’s weird I asked myself that. But I was among those who grew apart from them after I graduated in High school. The great distance was a real bitch. It affected my relationship with them so deeply, so you can’t really blame me for fearing if there would still be anyone happy to see me after a long time. In fact, it was almost 8 years sinc...

Marinating your manuscript simply means not reading your draft for a long time, say a month? A lifetime?  Before reading it again and realizing it is such a huge mess. It borrows from the concept of marinating foods in which you soak the meat in a combination of oils and spices to add more flavor and to tenderize the food. Apply this in writing and you’ll be surprised at the duplications, redundant phrases, words, fillers, chunks of irrelevant chapters, plotholes, and emotional chapters that cannot even trigger a single tear for a reader. I read this concept from Robert’s Rules of Writing written by Robert Masello . And I can say that this process really works. My WIP is now on my fifth draft and everytime I finish writing to the end of the chapter, I would just set it aside and discipline myself to never read it. The purpose of this is to strip off the illusion that you have written the best version, because who among us writers think that we have written a garbage ri...

You heard me right. And I am not fooling around, there’s no one behind my back forcing these words out my mouth. Bug fixing is actually fun. In my work I prefer tasks needing bug fixes rather than creating a new feature in our project. New features demand too much time analyzing what needs to be done, what alterations to be performed on the database, unit tests to write, and ensuring the design meets the company’s standards. Bug fixing on the other hand is like a game of cat and mice. And you get to play the role of the cat, which is kinda exciting. At first it’s scary, like searching for a needle in a haystack of codes, but done right, you’ll be able to get the hang of it. First of course, you need to replicate the scenario reported, need to see the error yourself. Then read the error message. What exception was thrown? Where? Which file? In my experience, I always see NullPointerException as the number one culprit. Others were ConcurrentModificationException, and o...