I am not Esther.
Well I am, to the government of course. To my family who named me and to the certificates that bears my qualifications. I am Esther…but I have never related to that name. Esther is a brilliant software engineer that fell in love with Java because everyone told her it was difficult. Esther is a researcher that would spend her time understanding theories and concepts. Esther is the Machine-Learning activist that is in awe of warfare technology and managment. Esther; I suppose, is my alter ego.
Esther is the one who built this portfolio from scratch, but she’s definitely not the one updating these blogs. That would be Eden. That would be me.
Eden is a fictional concept, Eden is the unspoken words, the less formal, less technical version of whoever Esther is. To Eden, Esther is personality that deals with the professional aspect and to Esther; Eden does not exist. Eden cannot Exist. Eden has no reason to exist in the middle of multiple pull requests and LLM’s.
But perhaps that is the problem. I’ve spent so much time refining Esther that I forget she is just, a component of a system. Esther builds and Eden writes why she builds. Esther cares about efficiency and Eden cares about effectiveness. Esther is the name on the certificate and Eden is the person staring at it.
And there is very little room for Eden when everything has to be useful, measurable, technical, or worth putting on a résumé.
So Eden can stay fictional, it’s probably better that way.
After all, Esther has always been very good at building things that do not exist.