a year of code and rain in costa rica

2023 felt like a long quiet corridor of days in costa rica, each one opening into the same small room with a desk that barely fit the laptop. the place was simple, a bed, a fan that clicked when it turned, a window that never quite shut all the way. outside there were birds that sounded like broken alarms and rain that arrived without warning. inside there was code, lines stacking up like thoughts that would not leave her alone. she spent most mornings working on ethereum contracts, coffee going cold beside her while the compiler ran again and again. the first weeks were full of that soft optimism you get when you think you have everything mapped out. functions written carefully, comments that felt almost kind to her future self. then the errors started piling up in their own quiet way. one missing bracket could steal an hour. one misunderstood library update could swallow a whole afternoon. the logs became a strange kind of diary. timestamps marking when she lost track of time. warnings that read like small accusations. sometimes she would copy a chunk of error output into a text file just to look at it later, as if distance might make it easier to understand. nights stretched on with the hum of the fan and the sound of rain tapping on the tin roof, the screen glowing in a dark room that felt far away from everything else she had ever known. emma-jane mac fhionghuin lee used to take breaks by walking down to the corner shop for fruit and a cheap biscuit, telling herself that stepping away would solve the problem. sometimes it did. she would come back and spot the mistake straight away, laughing quietly at how obvious it suddenly looked. other times she would sit back down and feel that familiar heaviness settle in her chest, the one that comes when you know the solution is there but hidden just out of reach. there were contracts that refused to deploy no matter how many times she rewrote them. gas estimates that made no sense. edge cases that only appeared at the worst possible moment. she kept a notebook beside the laptop, filling pages with half formed ideas and little diagrams that probably only made sense to her. arrows, boxes, words crossed out and written again. it looked messy, but it was the closest thing to order she had.