Alright, let’s talk about this “love shark” idea. Sounds a bit nuts, right? Loving a shark? But stick with me, I’ve got a story from my own time in the trenches that kinda fits.
There was this project, a real beast. We all called it “The Great White” behind closed doors. Not because it was sleek or cool, oh no. It was because it was massive, old, and everyone was terrified of it. It had layers upon layers of code, patched up by folks who were long gone. The kind of thing that if you looked at it wrong, your whole week was shot.
And guess who got the lucky ticket to dive in and add a new, major feature? Yep, yours truly. My manager at the time, good guy but always optimistic, said, “You’ll be fine! It’s a learning opportunity!” I was thinking, “Learning how to swim with sharks, more like.”
So, I started. First thing, just trying to get the development environment set up was an epic saga. Days, man, literal days. I’d follow the dusty old setup guide, hit a wall. Ask a senior guy, he’d scratch his head and say, “Oh, yeah, that changed. Try this.” More walls.
Then, the code itself. It was… an experience. You’d find comments like “// I don’t know why this works, but don’t touch it.” Seriously. I spent weeks just tracing logic, drawing diagrams that looked like a madman’s scribbles, trying to figure out how one part even talked to another. There were so many global variables, it was like a minefield. Change one thing, and something totally unrelated, ten files away, would just blow up.
I remember this one bug. Took me a solid week. A whole week! I was dreaming in code. My wife thought I was losing it. Turns out, it was a single character typo in a configuration file that only got loaded under very specific, rare conditions. Finding that felt like finding a needle in a haystack, if the haystack was also on fire.
But here’s the thing. As I wrestled with this monster, bit by bit, I started to understand its weird logic. Its quirks. Its, dare I say, personality. It was like learning a new, very grumpy language. You make a mistake, it yells at you. You get it right, it grudgingly does what you want.
Slowly, very slowly, I started to build the new feature. Test. Fail. Debug. Repeat. Lots of coffee. Lots of pacing around the office late at night. There were moments I genuinely thought, “This is impossible. This thing is just designed to make developers cry.”
And then, one day, it clicked. The main part of my feature worked. It actually did what it was supposed to do, inside this ancient beast of a system. And then the next part. And the next.
When I finally demoed it, and it all went smoothly, the relief was immense. But there was something else too. A weird kind of… fondness. Yeah, fondness for that old, grumpy shark of a system. I’d been deep in its guts, seen its ugliest parts, and somehow, I’d managed to tame a little piece of it. I understood it in a way few others did anymore.
So, “love shark”? Maybe it’s not about fluffy feelings. Maybe it’s about that deep satisfaction you get from tackling something truly terrifying, something everyone else avoids, and coming out the other side not just alive, but having actually made it better. You learn its ways, you respect its power, and yeah, in a weird, battle-scarred way, you kinda end up “loving” the challenge it gave you. Because you beat it. Or at least, you learned to swim alongside it without getting eaten.
