November 2, 2020 • Reading time: 3 minutes
It's almost time. This week is my last full week at Lightspeed; starting next week, I will be joining the embarking on a new journey of technical- and self-discovery at the Recurse Center. Exciting as it is, I also have to face the reality that "learn how to learn stuff" and "remember how to build stuff" aren't the most specific goals.
So, what do I actually want to get out of this? It's a hard one to nail down, and in some ways I'm hoping that my answer will change over the next three months. Most of all, I'm looking forward to working with other people on their stuff. I'm more excited to be surrounded by people with goals and projects and ideas unfettered by concerns of practicality, than I am by the prospect of the coming months to focus on my own back-burner projects. There will be time for that after my batch completes.
However, I feel like I'm not contributing if I come in without concrete goals of my own, so here we go. First, I want to flex my web muscles. I've been so deep in backend development for so long that I've lost the ability to build more than the most rudimentary of full-stack applications. Most of my future goals are web-oriented, so it's time for that to change. Second, I want to learn to start things. I've gotten so tangled in the nuances of architecture that I've forgotten how to hack together something ugly but functional. Instead, I retreat to my whiteboard, drawing pretty pictures that will never see a line of code.
So what, then, will I be starting? Mind you, I don't intend to finish most of these projects; in fact, I plan to start more than I finish. Hopefully that will give me a wave of momentum to ride in the months that follow the end of my batch.
In no particular order, the scribbles on my whiteboard are:
Aside from that, I'm not sure what I'll do. I'll probably think of something.