I build Mohio alone. One person, evenings and weekends and most of the hours in between, trying to get a programming language off the ground before the window closes. Most weeks are grind-but-fine. Then there are weeks like this one, where it feels like every door you walk up to slams before you reach it, and you start to wonder if the universe is trying to tell you something.
Here's the thing I only figured out looking back: almost none of it was as bad as it felt in the moment. That's the part I want to write down before I forget it, because I know I'll need to read it again.
It started with the compiler. Something broke, and it broke in a way that looked catastrophic. You know the feeling if you've ever built anything, that cold drop in your stomach where your brain immediately jumps to the worst version. The whole thing is broken. The timeline's gone. Everything you told people is now a lie. I sat there in full doom-and-gloom mode, convinced I'd hit the wall that ends it.
I stepped away. Made myself. An hour, maybe two, just not looking at it. Came back with a clearer head and actually looked at the problem instead of the story I'd wrapped around it. It was fixed in a few hours. Back on track by the same night. The bug was never the size it felt like. I was just exhausted and all-in, and when you're in that state your read on how bad something is might be the least trustworthy thing you own.
Then the grants and the applications. One rejection landed that I'd had real hopes for. But the email that came with it wasn't a door slamming, it was someone taking the time to tell me exactly why, exactly what to fix, and please resubmit, and here's a resource to help you do it better. That's not a no. That's a map. I had to sit with it a minute to see it that way, because in the moment "rejected" is the only word your eyes land on.
A partnership I'd been counting on hit a rough patch at the worst possible time, right in the middle of all of it. That one was a genuine gut punch. And every instinct in me wanted to fire back an email right that second, hot, defensive, the way you do when you're tired and stretched thin and it feels personal. I didn't. I waited. I wrote back calm, professional, and I asked for help instead of picking a fight. The person on the other end got back to me almost immediately, fixed it, told me exactly what I needed to know, and was genuinely good to me about the whole thing. It worked out better than if it had never gone wrong. And it worked out because I didn't send the version of that email I wanted to send.
Most of the other applications came through. One of them landed better than I'd even hoped for. So while I was busy grieving the couple that stung, the wins were quietly stacking up in the background where I wasn't looking.
I got a small, personal dose of exactly the thing my entire project exists to fight. - Ron Smith
And then Discord banned me. Two years. Until 2028. For spam.
A four-year-old account, never a single issue, gone. No explanation of what I actually did, no specific message they'd point to, and when I asked for a review they told me one time, no, and locked the door on any further appeal. I'd been posting build updates and sharing my project's community invite, the normal stuff you do when you're trying to get people to look at what you've built. Some automated system decided that pattern was spam and handed down a two-year sentence with no human anywhere in the loop to say "wait, let me look at this."
That one still isn't resolved. Not every closed door is secretly a window. Sometimes it's just closed, and you learn the lesson and route around it.
But here's why that one got under my skin more than the rest, and it's not really about Discord. The whole reason I'm building Mohio is that I'm tired of systems that make consequential decisions in the dark and won't show you their reasoning. Code you can't read. Tools that generate something behind a curtain and hand it to you and expect you to trust it. A machine that decides you're guilty and won't tell you of what. I got a small, personal dose of exactly the thing my entire project exists to fight. Mohio will never be like that. You'll always be able to read what it does and understand why. That's not a feature, it's the whole point, and this week reminded me why I care about it so much.
So that was the week. Compiler scare that wasn't. Rejection that was really a roadmap. Gut punch that resolved because I kept my mouth shut for an hour. Wins I almost missed because I was too busy staring at the losses. And one genuinely closed door I just have to live with.
The lesson, if there is one, is boring and I already knew it and apparently needed to learn it again anyway: when you're going full-tilt on hope and it doesn't go the way you need, take a breath before you react. The reactionary reply, the 2am spiral, the hot email, the doom story you tell yourself about the bug, that's the only move in any of these that could've turned something recoverable into something real. Every single time this week, the thing that saved me was stepping back long enough to see the situation at its actual size instead of the size my tired brain had inflated it to.
Closed doors, open windows. Except when they're just closed. You take those too.
Back at it tomorrow.
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Field Notes at Midnight is a weekly column by Ron Smith, who is building Mohio, an AI-native programming language, alone. New entries post weekly. The writing is unfiltered: the real work, the real setbacks, and what building something new actually feels like from the inside.
