And Then Realization Set In

Is it…?
Yeah, it is another imposter syndrome post.

I had (ok tbf still have but let’s not talk about it now) a few ideas regarding some things I wanted to write about. It was mostly some light-hearted comment or viewpoint on something, nothing I really deemed high quality. And yet I found myself critizing my every idea.

“The site looks horrendous!” (ok this one I give em)
“No one will even find this.” (structuring thoughts is valuable on its own)
“Nobody gives a shit!.” (well, jokes on me because I actually do)
“It’s not as interesting as I think it is.” (but it is interesting to me)
“It isn’t a worthy investment of time” (yeah as if those 30 minutes would have been spent being highly productive…)

But the idea was never to write the next big thing. Or be anything that goes viral. It was meant for one explicit and one rather implicit goal.
The explicit goal: Get some thoughts sorted out, try to make sense of them (in more than 7s segments), and get them out of my brain.
The implicit goal is the more important one: Just get going again with something that interests me.

Tinkering with software, trying to get an answer to that “wait, does it work if…?” that kept me up at night, or even just getting the last fucking test to pass for a module at uni 3h before deadline, those are quite cherished moments. There’s definitely some romanticizing in there, because I also know how much I hated the feeling of being a fucking failure when nothing worked and the problem seemingly just got worse and worse. But a good bit of enjoyment came out of being immersed, of being in that sweet, sweet tunnel.

For a few reasons I kept falling out of the habit of doing that. One is that I’m done with studying (which is a bad excuse). Another is that with work, bouldering and maybe a few hours of gaming a week my time energy is pretty much used up.
For me personally one bit of advice that worked quite well is that when I’m mentally not great, the answer usually is doing more of what I like¹, instead of just doing less.

Another came from a professor (for functional programming and more broadly speaking the more theoretical part of computer science) who I looked up to and owe quite a bit of this interest to. Although being one of the oldest professors, he was still pretty much up to date on tech trends, new framework development, modern patterns and so on. And probably the most important bit of advice that reached my scattered braincells was this: You have to stay curious and just try out things for the sake of trying them².

I think that’s true. You can read up all you want, but in the end you gotta put in a few lines of code and see how things work.
The advice itself isn’t new - or anything ground-breaking at all - but the reason it resonated so much with me is that the person that gave it showed that they didn’t just say it, but lived it.

And it did show. Even though he humbly excused his code, he did actually set up his IDE, started reading the docs and implemented a lot of not even so small demo projects for us to get familiar with a framework. Things I absolutely needed at that time because I would have been dead stuck after the infamous hello world. (On top of that he was very genuine, supportive, and sharper than any of us students even after our 4th cup.)

So here’s to just screwing around with things. Trying to make something just for the sake of creating, not with the intent to be consumed. To building experience, and expanding the toolbox again. To be shite at something. And definitely to making mistakes, bad decisions and taking a wrong turn³.