The second week of September. A tent, a fire, a few friends, a cooler of beer. Up towards Bolu, one bar of signal.
Three days later I came back with the answer to a design problem I had been stuck on for two weeks. It arrived by the fire; I noted it down without saying anything.
It was not the first time. Most of my best decisions this summer were not made at a keyboard.
Why this happens
While trying to solve something, my attention scattering happens more often than the solving. Even with no notifications: I switch tabs, look something up, notice another bug and fall into it.
By a fire none of that is available. The only thing you can do is sit and look. And a mind with nothing to occupy it returns to the job still open in the background.
What solves the problem is not more thinking; it is making room for thinking.
Building the fire is itself a job
Building a campfire resembles what I do at a computer far more than I expected.
There is a material hierarchy. Tinder first, then kindling, then small wood, then heavy logs. Break the order and it fails — put a log on and wait for flame and there is not enough heat, only smoke. (That is the same thing I was thinking about the order of rakı the same week.)
There is airflow. Stack the wood too tight and no oxygen gets in; too loose and no heat accumulates. There is a place in between and you find it by trying.
There is feedback. As the fire grows it can take heavier wood, heavier wood makes more heat, more heat ignites faster. Past a threshold it runs itself.
Every new system is the same: at first you feed everything by hand, and at some point the system starts producing its own heat. And people who put a log on before reaching that threshold always get the same result — smoke.
And the part that helps most
Camping’s real benefit is not rest — I can rest at home.
The real benefit is enforced emptiness. There is no signal, so you cannot work. There is no option, so there is no debate: you cannot say “let me just have a look”.
Without that enforcement I cannot manage three days of doing nothing. And back home I cannot manage it either.
What got solved by a fire this summer
- That the light show engine must hold no state — the question “why can’t you rewind it?” arrived by a fire.
- That the inspection form must not ask for a regulatory term.
- That a trading engine cannot be evaluated without a control group.
- That this log should be chronological, not organised by topic.
None of the four is “learning something new”. All four are things I already knew falling into place. The information was not missing; it was unsorted.
The end
The insidious part of engineering is that there is always something to do. One more bug, one more improvement, one more idea.
And the fact that the list never ends does not make stepping away from it unnecessary. Quite the opposite.
Watching a fire until it goes out, thinking about nothing, is also part of the work. At least it is for me.