The box opened with that signature, satisfying whoosh. Inside lay the fabled Apple Glasses, sleek and impossibly light. The dream was finally here: a seamless, augmented world where my code, my terminal, and my documentation could float in the air around me. For the first two hours, it was bliss. I pinned API docs next to my monitor, I had a virtual cat sleeping on my keyboard, and my Slack notifications appeared as gentle, dismissible bubbles. I was living in the sci-fi future I was promised. And then, I went to lunch.
The Sandwich Incident
I was in a cafe, about to take a bite of a perfectly constructed turkey club. The world was blessedly analog. For a moment, I had forgotten I was even wearing the glasses. That’s when it happened. A subtle, translucent card shimmered into existence in my right peripheral vision. It had a familiar, soul-chilling logo. It was Jira.
The ticket, PM-417, had a title of simply, “Button not working.” The priority was set to “Highest.” As I stared, my sandwich halfway to my mouth, the ticket just hovered there, a ghostly monument to my inability to ever truly be offline again. The mayonnaise suddenly tasted of despair. I tried looking away, but it just repositioned itself, patiently waiting for acknowledgment. The bug report was now part of the scenery.
Welcome to the Always-On Sprint
This is the terrifying, hilarious future of development work. There is no closing the laptop. There is no “I’ll look at it when I get back to my desk.” The desk is now your face. I’ve come to realize that developing for (and with) AR glasses introduces a few new paradigms:
- The Good: Your “time to acknowledge” a P1 incident is now measured in the milliseconds it takes for your optic nerve to fire. You are terrifyingly efficient.
- The Bad: The line between work and life has been replaced by a translucent overlay. You find yourself trying to explain to your date why a ticket titled “URGENT: PROD IS ON FIRE” is gently shimmering over their shoulder.
- The Absurd: Muting notifications now requires a level of meditative focus previously reserved for monks. You have to actively will the Jira ticket to fade away, which, ironically, makes you think about the broken button even more.
The technology is incredible, but the first app every developer will need is a Focus Mode so aggressive it borders on a digital witness protection program. For now, I’ve disabled Jira notifications. That turkey club deserved my undivided attention. The button could wait.