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My friend Yahia once asked me how I coordinate between everything on my plate. not how I manage the volume, he understood that part. what he wanted to know was how I handle the context switch. one hour I’m deep in SQL queries and database design. the next I’m reading a machine learning paper. how does that work, he asked. how does the mind move between places that different without losing something.
When I was a kid, I wanted to learn almost everything. theology, physics, chemistry, computer science, artificial intelligence, biology, not as curiosity for curiosity’s sake, but as a genuine orientation. I was drawn toward knowledge as a category, not toward any subject inside it. I wanted to understand how things worked, and I wanted to understand how they related to each other.
The problem was the people around me. not their fault, but they were the evidence I kept looking at. no one I could see excelled at all of it. not even close. the picture the world was showing me was that you pick a lane, you go deep, and that depth is where the results live. every system I was in, school, university, the way people talked about careers, rewarded the vertical. the specialist. the one who knows one thing completely. and I was not that. I was the one who kept moving horizontally, touching everything, carrying a general picture without owning any particular depth yet.
I miss Abdalwahab.
He used to be the only colorful thing in my grey days. and this Eid I felt his absence, not constantly, but every time your heart tries and search / looking for something familiar and finds nothing there. I was surrounded by people and I’m, and none of it touched the specific place he occupies. that is what frightens me about this kind of missing. it isn’t general loneliness. it is targeted, I can’t search for something, the ache for a particular person that no number of other people can fill the space the left, because they are not a type, they are a person, and there is only one of them.
Almost everyone can build a machine learning model now. you can prompt your way into a working pipeline in a matter of five minutes. building a model is not the problem, optimizing it is, understanding how and what it is doing are two completely different things, and that gap becomes very visible the moment you step into a competition.
I spent time participating in competitions on Kaggle and Zindi , joining teams, reading solutions, watching people work. and the pattern I kept seeing was the same: build a baseline, iterate, submit, repeat, and that’s fine, that’s how it works, but without ever asking why the iteration was moving in a particular direction. not having a compass. is what mostly happen. the leaderboard becomes the only signal, and you start optimizing for a number without understanding what the number means. that’s not learning. that’s just another form of guessing.
My earliest memory of a real community is 249 Unit, a video editing group I joined in 2018, when I was around fifteen. I don’t remember how I found it. I only remember the texture of being inside it: the average age was seventeen, a few outliers in their early twenties, and the whole thing had the specific energy that comes when people are young and making things together before anyone is doing it for money.
You were taught, somewhere along the way, that needing people was a liability. maybe no one said it out loud. maybe life just kept rewarding you every time you didn’t need anyone, every time you endured alone what others fell apart over, every time you moved on from something that should have broken you and didn’t. the lesson compounded, without you knowing: detachment works. self sufficiency works. you are the proof.