Herber Colop
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Beyond the code

Who I am away from the keyboard: the roads, the books and the music that keep me curious, and that shape how I work more than it might seem.

Motorcycles

Two wheels, mountain roads and the focus a good curve demands. Cars too, but motorcycles first.

Motorcycles have been a passion for as long as I can remember. Cars too, but a car carries you; a motorcycle asks you to take part.

Riding is the most present I ever am. A mountain road leaves no room for a stray thought: the line into a curve, the moment to brake, where to look, how far to lean. It is a lot like a hard problem at work, only louder and with a better view.

It also taught me a few things I bring back to the keyboard: prepare before you start, respect what you do not control, and never confuse confidence with skill.

  • Riding a blue Yamaha sport bike through a mountain curve, leaning into the turn
  • Leaning a blue sport bike into a right-hand curve on a mountain road
  • Taking a curve close to the hillside, knee towards the asphalt
  • Sitting on the blue Yamaha in riding gear under a sky full of clouds
  • Standing beside the bike in a helmet and leather jacket on a sunny road
  • Standing beside the bike by the roadside, helmet on, with trees behind
  • On the blue Yamaha at a petrol station at night, in a racing jacket
  • On the bike at a petrol station at night, seen from the side
  • Facing the camera on the bike at night, its headlights on
  • On the bike beside the fuel pumps at night
  • Crouching beside the bike outside a lit shop at night
  • The bike head-on at night, rider in a helmet behind the handlebars

Reading

I read philosophy and theoretical physics: books that ask what we are, how we should live and how the universe works.

I read to understand two things I will never fully understand: ourselves and the universe.

On one shelf sit the Stoics, Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, with Kant, Dostoevsky, Foucault and Borges: how to live, how to think, and what power and society do to us. On the other, Einstein's general relativity, Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne: black holes, spacetime, and the strange idea that the universe can be understood at all.

The two meet more often than it seems. Both start from a question that sounds simple and turns out not to be, and both reward patience more than cleverness. Some of what they taught me ended up in the essays below.

From the blog

  • Books

    On the questions we rarely ask ourselves, the decisions that make us who we are, and the books that can change both.

  • An analogy for life plans

    If life were deterministic, plans would be everything. A short reflection on treating them as guidelines rather than exact points.

Salsa

Rhythm, connection with a partner and hours of practice, set to Caribbean music.

Salsa is where I switch off the analytical side and let the music lead. It is rhythm first, then technique, and above all connection: a good dance is a conversation between two people with no words in it.

It is also practice, a lot of it. The same turn a hundred times until it stops being something you think about and becomes something you feel. That patience with the basics is something code and dance have in common.

From the blog

  • And then I saw you dance…

    A short story told from inside a phone: an assistant that profiles a dancer, learns to read her emotions, and one day starts to feel them.