I will discuss how it took me nearly 25 years to produce a 40-page book: the writing, typesetting and binding of my mock–mock-epic poem The Youth Hostel, and how this led to my hacking on LaTeX font support, taking over the maintainership of psutils, becoming a Debian Maintainer, and working for Google. On the way, I found that the opposites of Larry Wall's cardinal virtues of the programmer can also be virtuous.
