Woe is me! I am forced to learn almost everything from the beginning… I work and feel my incapacity. Memory has become poor as far as cramming is concerned, I have aged… I’m afraid of failing one of my examinations. I want to rest up but—summer is still so far off!
This post is unusual but quintessential for a developer like me that has lost seasons to wandering around, searching for the next technology to conquer, a new tutorial to learn, to fascinate a brutally inattentive audience. A post about piecemeals, stopping short but essentially starting all over again. The song about New Beginnings.
"Tech" for me started off a fascinating* animations on a web screen as well as mastering Excel, given my background in Statistics, which motivated a couple year journey into this ecosystem, the kind of years you would be proud of there was something tangible to show off, some well-lit accommodation funded by Tech* $$ or an Expert Badge Siren on a LinkedIn page, Certifications, you name it. However, here I am, reflecting on how the years have just flown by, the game gently nudging towards the unabashed audacity of new Actors far younger and agile - the ecosystem bending away from my general direction.
I mastered some basic HTML/CSS even worked a project for my first gig with google apps script, I would not "master" Excel, but built a school report system with it, otherwise it was projects around Python and R, mostly interventionist and tools for iterating tedious tasks - usually this is enough to claim some portion of Celebrity and write long tedious threads on Twitter, but the truth is far more inadequate and under-compensating, because without practice, constant practice, you are just a job away from been replaced by someone younger and cheaper. Without constant chirping away at our bad habits and constantly producing/deploying, we reverse.
Practice. How we are nothing without Practice - this is where one can admit that, see, I will never be a great painter, perhaps I would never be a great front-end person, I could never sing that song to save my life. Then, paradoxically, find my way to my strengths - things that have proven over the years to be my tendencies and convenient to adopt, and to practice un-failingly. It sounds tedious and true, because it is? Makes me recall this letter from Anton Chekhov to his brother in 1888:
In order to cultivate yourself and to drop no lower than the level of the milieu in which you have landed, it is not enough to read Pickwick and memorize a monologue from Faust. You need to work continually day and night, to read ceaselessly, to study, to exercise your will… Each hour is precious.
This post is about time, how I have easily squandered it, not building concrete concentration habits, how my younger self can be wicked focused - learning and competing, and how ultimately today's self is just that to tomorrow.
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