Yeah, so maybe a mulligan on 2022?

When I wrote about my intentions in January (I won’t even link to it because it’s one post ago), something I’d considered would be a part of regular blogging was that I’d be increasing my cadence of technical posts. What I hadn’t considered was just how constraining it feels to write about one’s work when one works for a publicly-traded company. There’s definitely plenty I could write about, but it feels… I don’t know if precarious is the right word, but tip-toeing around the specifics of the types of problems I work on day-in and day-out feel like a game I wasn’t and am still not ready to play, and it’s greatly hindered my interest in opening up this post editor throughout the year.

And, speaking of specifics, I didn’t do so hot on most of the rest of my intentions either. Going forward, it’s probably best for me to spend time here when I have something to share versus pre-announcing things I might be ready to share at some point. Even if it’s one I’ve already instrinsically known, I’ve learned a lesson yet again.

That said, this year wasn’t a total bust. By far the biggest highlight was riding bikes all summer with my partner who purchased a new one in May after not having one for many years. She wound up riding longer distances frequently enough that I too bought a new bike – the first multi-speed bike I’ve ever owned. In September, we rode in the St. Paul Classic, an annual event that takes cyclists around the edges of St. Paul, and we even rode to and from the event, logging over 40 miles in total. I rode over 300 miles in September, slightly less in October no thanks to the weather (including our first snow of the season), and only one day in November, but I’m already looking forward to next year and I’m thinking about some attainable mileage goals based on those numbers.

Better still, I got to spend some quality time with family thanks to those bikes, including a taproom crawl with one of my favorite cousins and his wife, and a long ride with my partner to visit my grandma, whom I hadn’t seen since before the start of the pandemic. As someone who’s more or less averse to the outdoors, it was a most wonderful time of year to be out and moving around.

As for everything else on my list of intentions? Well, I tried, but not intently. I wrote a few poems and I read a few books, but I didn’t hit the numbers. I sketched here and there, but I didn’t work on animation or try and put music to it. Every time I opened a code editor on my personal time, I’d groan and turn off my computer. Worse still, I didn’t send a single thank you card even though I thought about it all the time.

I’m not without accomplishment, though! We launched a Roku app in August that took me through some real challenges. I traveled for the first time since 2019. Next Monday, I’ll be playing drums for the first time in six years (whaaaat?)! I learned how to make deviled eggs. I quit Rocket League cold turkey and finally played another game start to finish (Metroid Dread, which I completed today).

Is any of it noteworthy? To me, it is. We get just this one life, and we’re all doing our best. And I know that even if I’m not hitting my stride, at least I’m pushing forward in whatever way I can. I’ll get there. I just gotta keep moving.

Chris Lema published a blog post at the beginning of this month entitled Stop Making Premature Announcements that really resonated with me. I can’t count the number of times in my life I’ve said to someone else, “I’m going to,” “I plan to,” “I want to,” and so on only to realize weeks or months later that I lost interest or focus or drive on the thing I planned, wanted, or was going to do that I simply never saw through to the finish.

It’s far better to be able to proclaim “I did it,” “I built it,” “I created it,” or “I finished it, here it is!”

That post was written in October, and I published my last post at the beginning of August. In that post, I declared that I’m open for business. On September 1st, I began a new Senior Software Engineer role where most of my energy during the day has kept me focus on meeting new people, learning how to work together, figuring out what we’re working on (and how to work on it), and simply getting up to speed like everyone must when they start with a new company.

Two things are certain: I’m loving the challenges, and between everything I’m juggling during the day and the still ever-present state of the world, I’ve just been far too mentally exhausted by the end of the day to accomplish much else.

At the start of the year, I set extremely modest goals for myself. I wanted to keep things light. As light as possible. With everything that’s been going on in the world, from the pandemic to the climate (regular and political) to the struggles everyone has been facing, some far more disproportionately than others, maintaining an upbeat attitude while surviving alone feel like enough of an accomplishment alone. Admittedly, I haven’t been eager to add a set of goals to that load.

With that laid out, this is going to feel so small. I recognize how small it is, how insignificant. But, in this year, in these times, with everything else going on, and how difficult it has been for me to maintain extra motivation and allocate time for creativity, learning, and exploration, I accomplished something I set out to do this year, and I want to tell you about it.

I accomplished my goal of completing 15 books this year.

See? It’s nothing. The effort was full of stops and starts all year long, and the majority of the books I finished I started reading sometime after June. Some of them were technical books, including one that I read as part of the Dev Book Club during the spring, and some were fast, easy reads. But, the important thing is that I set out to do something, I did it, and now I’m telling you about it. And the great thing is, it’s still October, I can still read the rest of the year, and still feel proud that I accomplished something so small.

Here are the books I’ve finished in 2021:

1. Building GitHub Actions by Michael Heap
2. The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates
3. Refactoring by Martin Fowler
4. The First Bad Man: A Novel by Miranda July
5. She Memes Well by Quinta Brunson
6. Breath by James Nestor
7. Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
8. Node.js Web Development by David Herron
9. You are a Badass at Making Money by Jen Sincero
10. Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes
11. Little Weirds by Jenny Slate
12. St. Paul by William Lindeke
13. Exploded View by Sam McPheeters
14. Based on a True Story by Norm Macdonald
15. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
16. Humblebrag: The Art of False Modesty by Harris Wittels

I’m currently reading The Gunslinger, the first book in The Dark Tower series by Steven King. 11/22/63 and Under the Dome are two of my favorite novels I’ve read to date, and I’m looking forward into digging into this expansive series. Maybe I’ll even finish it! You won’t hear about it again until I do.

Anyway, I’ve been wanting to write this post for awhile, but I haven’t known how to put things into words. I’m glad I finally did. I hope to do so again soon, but I promise it won’t happen until I’ve accomplished something.

Thanks for reading. I hope you’ve been well.

Over the weekend, I read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, the best-selling author of Eat Pray Love. It was loaned to me by my partner, Abby, who set it on the coffee table and left a Post-It note that read “Follow your curiosity…” stuck to page 235. Recognizing it as the act of love that it was, I started from the beginning and read it straight through to the end of the course of two days. I’m so glad I did.

The central idea in Gilbert’s book is that living a creative life is a choice we each make. She suggests that ideas are ethereal, and that they come to those who are ready to accept them and work to bring them into existence. We can choose to listen for these ideas – they are quiet, almost faint, and often are not immediately clear – or we can let them go, and they’ll find someone else willing to see them through. Ignore ideas long enough, and they will stop coming to you.

I used to live a creative life. Or, I suppose as the late Mitch Hedberg might say, “I still do, but I used to, too.”

Growing up, I passed the time by drawing cartoons, usually as a way to entertain my friends. My favorite illustration-based storytellers were Bill Watterson, Gary Larson, Berkeley Breathed, Mike Judge, Matt Groening, and Bill Plympton. I carried around with me a notebook where I’d put what I thought were my best ideas into it, and slowly built up a little catalog of quickly drawn cartoons paired with terrible puns.

I started working at a fast food restaurant the summer before my 16th birthday. Two summers later, I hadn’t saved up much, but managed to convince a co-worker to loan me enough money to purchase a drum set. It took me over a year to pay her back in full, and by the end of that year, I’d started playing drums with other musicians, and pursued that creative path for quite some time after. I played in a lot of different bands, and through the years, I designed stickers and t-shirts and illustrated numerous record covers and show posters.

It was during that time that I purchased the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating a Web Page & Blog, and started teaching myself about web development.

In the subsequent years, I built simple static sites for myself and my friends’ bands, as well as my first ever site for a small business. I never pursued the practice as a full-time thing – I enjoyed doing it too much in my free-time over nights and weekends, slowly building up a catalog of knowledge and being able to achieve more and more.

In 2011, I enrolled in an Associate of Applied Science program at my local community college. During that time, I wasn’t actively playing in a band, but I was renting out a practice space near Downtown Minneapolis so I had some place to go to play drums. I bought a desktop computer and put it in that space so that I could also continue to work on my programming skills. I took that time to explore creative writing in the form of poetry and occasional prose, and I did a redesign on this website that included some of that poetry and my illustration.

Two years later, I began my first web development internship. After I graduated in May of that year, I was given the opportunity to work full-time at that same agency and have been generally working in that exact same space ever since: agency WordPress development with a dash of Shopify.

By 2017, my partner and I bought our first home. I had just quit my last band a few months prior, and before we moved, I gave my (second) drum set away to my friend and former bandmate Matt. I felt that I was done playing music, and couldn’t bear the thought of having a drum set just sitting up in storage, and we didn’t have much room for it anyway (not to mention our neighbors probably wouldn’t take terribly kindly to me bashing away at the kit).

From that time until now, the only constant has computer programming. My focus narrowed to primarily back-end development upon joining an agency that worked with larger corporate clients, and as I mentioned in my last post, I’ve felt more or less like I’ve been treading water since then. I still draw, but not seriously. I still make music, but haven’t committed myself to it. I still write code, but it’d been so narrowly focused at work that my hunger for more has largely been dependent on my energy levels at the end of the day and on weekends.

It’s possible only my friends have read about any of this on my blog, since I changed the focus to only the computer programming aspect some time ago. I still intend to keep that focus here, but as of today, and in the spirit of Elizabeth Gilbert and with much thanks to my beloved partner, I am taking active steps to reclaim my time and my creative life.

I am a musician.

I am an illustrator.

I am a poet.

I am a computer programmer.

I am a business owner.

I’m still working on the next phase of my career, but one thing that is clear is that I want to get back to working on interesting projects. I want to help people who are struggling to reach an audience over the internet to build their platforms and give them a voice. I want to build meaningful relationships and empower others to be able to express their own creative voice by creating and assembling the tools that they need to achieve that.

If you’re working on a project or are just getting started with a new idea, and you need technical expertise, I can help. At this time, I’m open to taking on projects involving full website builds, custom plugin or application development, or website upkeep and maintenance. My primary experience centers around WordPress, but if you need help building a Shopify site, or you already have or want to build a web application in another language such as PHP, Python, Node, or Go, I’m most interested in these new challenges and will work with you to help you create your vision on top of these platforms using industry-standard frameworks, practices, and tools.

Interested in working together? Then let’s talk.

Resources

Thanks once again to my wonderful partner Abby for helping me recognize my path back to a creative life, and for all of her love and support over the years.

You can learn more about Big Magic at Elizabeth Gilbert’s website:

Big Magic

If you have a Spotify membership, you can listen hear me play drums via this playlist:
(edit: removed. I canceled my Spotify subscription in favor of Tidal)

Here’s an illustration I posted on this website several years ago, drawn on an iPad:

Here’s an animated GIF I made from photos I took at the Minnesota State Fair in 2013:

Finally, I republished one poem I wrote in 2011, entitled Waiting.

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I’ve learned this weekend that it doesn’t matter whether any of this is any good. What matters is that I continue to create. I’ll leave it to the rest of you to love, hate, or feel nothing at all about any of it. This time is all we get. Thanks for reading.