I have been working through some technical issues regarding upgrading the operating system on the web server that this blog runs on. This post isn’t about those issues, although I’ll likely write a long post on that topic someday soon. Apologies for the frequent outages over the past 48 hours, though!

What I am talking about here is a strange quality or aberrant pattern of behaviour that I possess regarding technical problem solving. I am basically almost entirely unable to walk away from an unresolved issue.

This oddity fuelled my technical career. Someone would say “I don’t know how to do that”, “That can’t be done”, or “No one has been able to make that work”, and off I’d go. More often than not no one said anything: I just saw the problem myself and got mentally trapped into fixing it.

So this post is a brief look into my brain’s misbehaviour around ‘unsolvable’ technical challenges: the good and the bad.

Continue reading On being tenacious →