Firstly, thank you for the inspiration Kupajo | A premiere internet dorkboard. I'd highly recommend this site; it's got tons of gems, like this one.
This last week I caught myself saying, this work is so boring. It is true, most of the work had become easy and quite automatic. Yet it did not feel right to dismiss something so easily. To be candid, most of my time is spent in either the struggle or the mundane, with the occasional jolt of energy from overcoming something hard. I'd like to have a different outlook about the mundane. Not to pretend that it's not what it is, but to try to find a nugget or two of joy in it. It could mean trying to do something differently or being curious about the current way of doing things. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to do this; I'll report back later based on how it goes. Step one is always having the intent anyway. You can't score without a goal.
Semblance of a plan
The mundane
Currently, I'm working on my SAAS which has a client, and I contract myself out writing Go backends so that I can pay the bills and invest the rest back into my own projects. Both of these projects are in a stable state.
I'll start off with the mundane on my SAAS. Right now it's a Golang and HTMX project; there are some interesting features in the pipeline. I get really bored working on the UI, yet it's such an important part of the project as it's the surface area for user interaction. So the goal here is to improve the user experience and enjoy the process of working on the UI. Cleaning up the UI, having a consistent interface, etc. Not much of a plan, but it's what I've got.
The contract is a Golang server; most of the APIs are quite easy to build. So my goal is to work on the monitoring and improving response times. It's quite a busy service with over a million requests per month, so there is a huge opportunity to make the service better for a lot of users. The resources are a bit constrained, but I'd like to take this as a challenge.
The hard
Somehow, this one I'm not too worried about, as I have this innate drive to be master of my craft. It's just hard to see very little to no progress sometimes, but I still find myself coming back to try again. The only thing I'd like to improve here is the time I spend on it. I'd like to do this more often so that I can reduce the time I spend in the valley of despair. Familiarity and consistency have a way of fast-tracking progress. Currently, the things I'm working on are writing embedded software, drivers, etc. I do these live on stream, so it's been acting as free motivation. On the other side, I've been working on writing a linter in Zig. My knowledge of Zig has been challenged to its limit. Somehow I like that aspect. The challenge has been to come back often enough. I'm seeing a theme here. The plan is to track time spent working on this to begin with, I guess. Not sure yet.
Why?
That is the question, isn't it? Why find joy in the mundane? I guess for me it's an indicator that I'm not moving forward. It's something I'm still exploring; I'll probably need one blog to fully unravel. So I'll report back on any progress or things that clearly did not work in the upcoming weeks.