It was a cool, mid-October evening. The sun was setting in the distance. The lone programmer turned around, removing his focus from the foggy window. He tapped his fingers on his keyboard, looking for inspiration for his next project. As he perused his Steam library, he was bombarded by inefficiencies in the application’s layout. With a revived sense of self, he let out a deep breath, before beginning work on his own digital distribution service.

With frightening pace, his fingers danced around the keyboard, as the sun’s fading light cast long shadows across the programmer’s desk. Before long, he’d designed his pre-alpha layout for testing and had all his work uploaded to his private development server. He stood up from his desk chair for the first time in hours and walked to the kitchen to get himself a glass of orange juice. As he strode back towards his study, half-filled glass of orange juice in his hands, he stumbled over a loose ethernet cable. Silently cursing his lack of organisation, he promised himself he’d clean up the hall and study before he finished programming for the night. He re-entered his warm, stuffy study and sat in his desk chair. He flexed his fingers and cracked his knuckles before starting up the application to test how it functioned so far. But then, disaster struck.

If you’ve enjoyed this story, look out for Chapter 1 of “The Lone Programmer”, coming soon!