Starting Again

A Fresh Start

I've been struggling a lot this year. I got stuck in a hole and it took me a while to find my way out. But I learned a few things along the way and I'm very excited about what's coming next.

I've accepted a job as a Ruby on Rails instructor at The Iron Yard. I'll be training people to become engineers in a very short timespan. For over a year, I've been whispering now and then about an interest in teaching, to Norma and friends. Starting January 5th, I'll have my first students. I'm equal parts nervous and exhilarated. I can't wait.

Learning How to Quit

A lot of my happiness and self-worth is tied up in making visible progress on things I care about. Over the past 10 months I lost faith in what I was doing at work and enthusiasm for my personal projects. Rather than recognizing that I should find a job I was passionate about or spend time on projects that excited me, I dug my heels in. No longer.

At one point, I said a Nintendo emulator was my forever project. I'd still like to see it taken further but I'm not going to work on that now. Belligerently sticking to those guns has been limiting my own potential. The only purpose of personal projects is to learn and to grow. They are mine and no one else's.

So until further notice, the emulator is on the backburner. Coleslaw will still get maintenance work but probably not much feature development. There are new things I'm fired up about and my focus will be on deriving as much momentum from them as possible.

Going Forward

I'm playing with Renoise and trying to pick up some music theory. I'm still not really making songs but I'll get there. I'm continuing to learn melee and now that I have a real training regiment in place I'm seeing much faster improvement. Hopefully I'll make it out to local tournaments every now and then.

I want to become more structured about practice. That includes starting to chip away at the stacks of CS and programming books I own that I haven't gotten around to reading. And experimenting with new tools like Ocaml, OpenMirage, and Ansible. And making room for play where nothing gets done.

I need to learn how to love and care for myself in spite of how much I get done, in spite of visible progress made or unmade. Part of that is going to be taking back my online presence, away from the more cultivated space of the last few years. There's a lot I want to accomplish over the next year or so. I'm sure plenty of what I learn won't be according to plan. But it's time to get going. It's time get organized. It's time to dig in.