Attention Span

I love what I do. For me, programming is one of the only arts I actually enjoy day in and day out. It goes without saying that there is an infinite list of problems that can be solved with diligence and lines of code. The growth of open source software has exploded with hosted version control services; the most popular being GitHub. There are thousands of repositories in all sorts of languages affording anyone the opportunity to contribute. Even with this being the case, I find it increasingly difficult to decide on what I want to work on.

I am guilty of reading Hacker News regularly and reveling in the flavor of the month. It just so happens that I work with Go at my day job and I have been following Rust for over a year since I left my university. These are certainly two up and coming languages that have gained notoriety in the software engineering landscape. As a developer, staying current is critical to keeping an edge. I have found that one of the best ways to do this is to work on side projects with technology you might not otherwise use. Of course this is not a necessity when it comes to getting or keeping a job. I do not intend to slight those who choose not to work on side projects or can not because of other responsibilities.

Even though I am motivated to program after work hours, it’s nearly impossible to settle on what the project should be. Often times I will start on something only to find there are dozens of implementations already. This feels defeating even though I can still build and learn from it. If everybody had this attitude then nothing outstanding would ever be produced. Another circumstance is when I have zero to little domain knowledge on a topic. I once tried to convince my coworker to write a client library for a popular message queue. I soon discovered that binary protocols, asynchronous sockets, and back off handling is difficult. Herein lies my lack of focus. I could learn these topics! It would take time and effort, but I could do it.

My focus is often too ephemeral. I already established the fact that I could solve anything with code and yet I still waiver. Pushing myself to focus more is something I will try and improve next year.

I would be delighted if anyone wished to share a similar experience or their thoughts with me. Or if you have some projects that need some aid, feel free to ping me about them. My contact information can be found on my website: https://garrettsquire.com