At 54, I still find some wonder in the coordination of complex systems. Making a single process(or) step through a linear sequence of steps is BORING, but makin

At 54, I still find some wonder in the coordination of complex systems. Making a single process(or) step through a linear sequence of steps is BORING, but making a hundred or a thousand work together in some complex dance without skipping a beat can still feel pretty amazing. Maybe it's more like juggling than magic: the more balls are in the air at once, and the faster they're moving, the better. You can even get that feeling without true concurrency, when many pieces of a complex system each step in to do their brief essential part before stepping out again. Of course, when such systems fail the results can be spectacularly bad, but I guess that's the price you pay to experience the wonder when it's working. For fun, look up "Strandbeest" or "Wintergatan marble machine" on YouTube to see some mechanical equivalents that (at least for me) trigger the same satisfaction at seeing the parts of a complex system come together.