Hacker and physicist – a tale of "common sense"

Summary

I'm what you might call a "Stone Age" programmer. Not because I code with rocks and sticks, but because my toolkit is filled with ancient relics like LISP and OCaml - functional programming languages that are about as popular in today's enterprise world as flip phones at a tech conference.I spent three glorious years in the industry writing functional code, and let me tell you, it was like being a minimalist artist in a world of reality TV. Those languages taught me to appreciate the elegance of software craftsmanship, much like Paul Graham describes in "Hackers and Painters." Graham's comparison between hackers and painters - both creating something from nothing, both obsessing over beauty that most people will never notice - still resonates with me today.But here's the plot twist: my day job isn't painting digital masterpieces in LISP. I've been working in InfoSec since 2007, and for the past two years, I've been a security architect at a multinational company, dealing with compliance and security architecture. In the China market, this is basically a luxury job - like being a food critic in a town that only has fast food. Most local companies would rather spend money on anything else before investing in proper security compliance.This job has given me a front-row seat to the cutting edge of enterprise security, which I'm grateful for. But it's also created a weird kind of cognitive dissonance that reminds me of my college dreams of becoming the next Einstein.You see, my first degree was in Optical Information Science and Technology - basically, I wanted to be a physicist. My second degree was Computer Science. Physics seeks the fundamental laws of the universe. Information security, it turns out, deals with the fundamental laws of the digital world - and the uncomfortable reality that most people prefer to pretend these laws don't exist.The Great Certificate MysteryLet me tell you about the moment that perfectly captured this absurdity.I'm sitting in a routine se...