“I would lock my vision straight at the computer screen, trance out, and become a human-machine hybrid zipping through the virtual architecture that my co-workers and I were building. Hunger, thirst, sleepiness, and even pain all faded away while I was staring at the screen, thinking and typing.” Slate’s David Auerbach on Coder’s High: Programming is just like drugs, except the dealer pays you.

+ Mojo: Is coding the new literacy?