I Suck (and so do you)

I suck. You suck. We all suck.

And that’s a good thing.

Eight years ago I didn’t suck at my job as a software engineer. I was pretty awesome, in fact. I was with a small company pushing our software forward. I was using ASP.NET to help replace our aging web tech. I was going on marketing demos to show off our product. I wrote a whole new product from the ground up. I was hot stuff.

I spent five years at that job. The company was awesome, and the people were friendly. I don’t think I’ll ever have a better boss than I did there. The problem was that I was good.

After a few years, I was getting antsy. I couldn’t pin it down at first. I began to realize it was because I was stagnating. I was good, so why improve? You could say I could’ve gone from good to great, but being “good” actually made it impossible to be “great”. Being “good” doesn’t drive me.

I began painting miniature figures for Warhammer. I sucked. Hard.

I originally captioned this as “improvement from the first”. The first would give you nightmares.

That’s the earliest I could dig up. Whew. That’s bad. It’s a little unfinished, but I assure you finishing it didn’t make it any better.

I sucked. So every time I painted a new one, I tried to improve by either focusing on honing one technique or trying something new. I never painted things just to paint them. I painted them to get better at…