The Inciting Incident #
After combing through the internet for a while, watching some Youtube videos of people in tech, giving a retrospective on their personal projects, and how they got everything up and running. I decided to play around with the idea of creating a few projects of my own. Not just for exposure or attention (or at least not just that), but to also see what I am actually capable of as an individual.
So here I am, documenting my journey into discovering (and occasionally re-discovering) the boundaries of my knowledge and skills when it comes to software development.
The Intro #
And so, I started playing around with some ideas on what I could do. And… Nothing. Zilch. Nada. I had 0 ideas. My brain was completely blank. If you could see look into my skull at that moment, you’d probably see air. I started questioning whether I could do anything at all. So like any self-respecting individual, I blamed it on my environment and sought to enhance my developer experience. I decided that it was time to get myself out of Windows and into the developer’s paradise: Linux. But which distro? Am I nuking my PC for this? How about backups? What if I can’t go back? And that’s when it hit me.
Burning the Boats #
To commit fully to a course of action and eliminate any possibility of retreat.
And so I did. I nuked the only laptop I had at the time, and installed Linux, specifically Ubuntu. No backups. No boats. It felt familiar, but oh so new and shiny. I was excited. It felt like I was learning to use a computer again for the first time. But I knew nothing, I browsed around and didn’t know where to start (as you can tell, this happens a lot). I felt stuck again.
Luckily, Youtube and Google read my mind (or my data, whichever you prefer), and I was thrust into a sea of knowledge. Some of it was useful, but most of it was beyond my reach. I had been so windows pilled that I didn’t even bother to check my security settings to see if everything was in order. It was not. It took the 3rd video in my queue telling me that I needed to enable it for me to realize that.
It took a few weeks, but I got to a point where I was comfortable with the new OS. The muscle memory and the terminology needed some time to catch up, but it was progress nonetheless.
The Code! #
I don’t know if you noticed it yet. But at this point in time, I wrote a total of 0 lines of code. And hopefully that fact alone, and this first post would be enough for you to know if this is something worth following. With a goal in mind, a novel intent, and the genuine desire to learn, I somehow end up somewhere else entirely.
But I’m having fun along the way (and still learning new things). Some of the things here will be informative, some useless, and some will be just me rambling about my day. But… Yeah, I made a website. More to come.
