I haven’t written - or programmed - anything since last October…yikes. When was the last time you went that long without touching your keyboard? 😬 In fact, today is the first day since my last post (again, last October) that I’ve even sat down in my home office to do more than vaccum dust bunnies. It’s wild, you know? I used to sit at this desk every day, from 7:30am through 4pm, like clockwork, like a truly driven, hardworking maniac.

I friend recently pointed out to me that it’s been 1 year since I left my job. I hadn’t been paying particularly close attention, largely because it (apparently) wasn’t very important to me. But having someone congratulate me on it made me sit back and think about it a bit. After choosing to leave a job that burt me down to a withered stump (or, you could say, I allowed to burn me down to a withered stump), let’s have a retrospective, shall we?

I was raised to work hard. Which is great! I have a fabulous work ethic, especially when I’m fully bought-in to a project, and it’s served me well all the way through school and into the professional world. I think everybody should know how to work hard, and be ready and willing to do so when the time and case demands it. BUT I think it’s important to note: You are not magically a better person because you’ve worked hard.

I have a friend who talks about programming making you feel alternately like a genius and an idiot, and every developer I’ve mentioned this to since laughs and agrees. Years ago he sent me this picture to illustrate his point: We've all been here. Over and over. I think about this a lot when I’m wrestling with a problem, whether it’s a new concept, bug in my code, or whatever. It’s actually a salve to my wounds, because it reminds me that whatever issues I’m having today will probably be gone tomorrow - or even maybe in the next hour.

I’m blowing the dust off of an old project idea, and I’m finding the many development options avaialable pretty overwhelming. I’m so used to writing code in a preexisting codebase that having the option to choose anything I want and the options themselves feel like a lot for me to sift thorough right now. It’s like trying to pick a brand of toothpaste at the grocery store.