So, you’re asking about the Faith Ordway ex, huh? Man, that really throws me back to a specific time. It wasn’t something flashy, not at all. You wouldn’t find it in any trending tech blogs, that’s for sure.
I actually stumbled onto it because I was in a bit of a rut. I’d just wrapped up a freelance gig that went completely sideways – you know the kind, scope creep from hell, client changing their mind every five minutes. I was feeling pretty burnt out, to be honest, and needed something totally different to get my brain working again. Something foundational, something that felt… real. My buddy, who’s into all sorts of obscure programming history, mentioned looking up some of Faith Ordway’s older exercises, specifically one he just called the “ex.”
My Dive into the “Ex”
Finding the darn thing was the first challenge. This wasn’t some neatly packaged online course. I ended up digging through some ancient-looking mailing list archives. Eventually, I found a series of posts, barely formatted, that laid out this “ex” – it seemed to be a really deep dive into data manipulation, but with a philosophy behind it I hadn’t seen much before. Almost like a puzzle, but with code.
So, I decided to give it a shot. My setup was basic: just my old laptop, a simple text editor, and a lot of coffee. The first few days were rough. I mean, really rough.
The instructions, or rather, the guidelines, were sparse. It was all about figuring things out from first principles. I remember thinking:
- This is way harder than it looks.
- Why am I even doing this?
- Maybe I should just go watch some cat videos.
I spent a solid week just trying to get the initial part to behave. There were no easy answers, no Stack Overflow threads for this specific beast. It was just me, the cryptic instructions, and a lot of trial and error. I’d write some code, it would blow up. I’d rethink, try again, and it would blow up in a slightly different way. Progress felt glacial.
I’d take breaks, walk around, try to clear my head. My kitchen table was covered in scribbled notes and diagrams. It was frustrating, no doubt. But then, slowly, things started to click. A small part would work. Then another. It was like chipping away at a block of stone. You don’t see the statue at first, just dust and effort.
The “ex” forced me to really understand what I was doing at a granular level. No relying on fancy libraries to do the heavy lifting. It was all about building it up, piece by painful piece. I learned more about how data actually moves and transforms in those few weeks than in a lot of other projects I’d done.
Eventually, I got through it. Well, most of it. There was one final section that I never quite cracked perfectly, but I got the core of it working. The feeling wasn’t like, “Woohoo, I’m a genius!” It was more like a quiet satisfaction. Like, “Okay, I wrestled that bear, and I didn’t get completely mauled.”
I don’t actively use the specific techniques from the Faith Ordway ex in my day-to-day work now. Things move fast, tools change. But the experience itself? That stuck. It taught me patience, and how to approach a really tough problem systematically, even when you feel like you’re hitting a brick wall. Sometimes, going back to basics, the hard way, is what you need to really get it. It’s not always about the latest shiny thing, you know?