Why I made this website
It’s been a while since I had the time or cared enough to maintain a website for myself. As a software engineer, I found that over time I gradually lost interest in using a computer outside of work.
That made me sad, because I am truly grateful to be paid to do something that I had at one point spent countless hours doing in my free time. After enough time had passed, I began to reflect on the situation and try and start to understand what had happened. The answer seems simple now - I had stopped learning for the sake of learning.
When acquiring new a new skill, almost every day is filled with first-encounters. Especially so with programming. The amount of information required to begin understanding how software interacts with underlying physical hardware is more than enough to keep you busy for multiple lifetimes. But people tend to achieve a level of proficiency that allows them to carry out the task at hand and then stop learning.
This is understandable - there’s only so many hours in the day and there are other things in life to care about. It’s largely what happened to me. Once I started making enough money to pay the bills and support my family, I felt less of a need to learn things outside of what it took to accomplish the immediate tasks at hand at work.
Writing code for a living was enough to keep me mentally stimulated for more than a decade, but once I started taking on more leadership responsibilities it didn’t take long before I felt my skills begin to atrophy.
This is something I have heard people more senior than myself talk about my entire career, but when it started happening to me it felt terrifying. If I lost my ability to do the thing that had gotten me to this point in the first place, how long until I’m no longer useful to the people I’m entrusted to lead?
This may all sound a bit melodramatic, but it’s been gnawing at me for years now. I just haven’t have the time, energy, or ability to do anything to change it. I still love my job - and it was never really an option to go back. I found (and still find) it very rewarding to have more of an impact than what I could achieve by only writing code. However, somewhat fortuitously, the less time I had to do what I truly love at work, the more time I was willing to spend my free time searching for ways to reintegrate this passion into my daily life.
Going forward
I’ve spent the past several months rediscovering things that I had previously lost interest in. Simple things like building computers, installing operating systems, configuring my desktop environment, and tweaking my favorite text editor. It’s been a lot of fun, and going forward I am going to write about them here. This will mostly be a form of self-therapy and archiving for the sake of posterity, but I’m going to do this publicly in the off chance that someone else finds anything I have to say interesting or useful. That’s it for now. Thank you if you’ve decided to read this far, and have a nice day.