An empty page, that is a dangerous thing.  Literally anything can manifest.  This could be the next great work of American fiction.  A self-help book that saves a bunch of people’s life from the brink of peril, well that is possible too.  All that potential makes it hard to start.  Just to start writing that is so hard, and this is just a page.  What about really big things?  What about a career?  What about a life?   Those empty pages are almost too daunting to fathom.

An abundance of choice, I can’t handle that stuff.  I think I spin my wheels.  I am a smart and clever enough guy to do a lot of things.  I don’t really eliminate the options either.  I just think I can do a bit of everything.  Well that’s a path to where I am at, I am just sort of here.  I never really built a career or a business, mostly because I bounced about a lot.  Exploring too many options and too much freedom, that was my downfall.

Restrictions force creativity.  Becoming better at embracing restrictions, well that can create a bit of focus that might allow something to happen.   Too much freedom, it is probably the rare person that can handle that.  I have lived a lot of years with a lot of professional freedom, and I am through with that.  Focus, is the path forward.  One job, one project, one blog, that’s about all I need in my life.  Great ambitions, I don’t have those anymore.  I am going to fill this page, and that’s enough.

photo credit: Antti Kyllönen Great minds only need simple tools via photopin (license)

My craft is software development, this means I am a problem solver.  In theory I am supposed to be good at finding and executing solutions.  I tend to do a decent job on work projects, and people seem fairly happy with my work.  I can program, I have a decent understanding of math and physics, there are times I think I might be a master of the universe.

Having a touch of ambition I try and think ahead and do a bit of life planning.  I have yearly goals and try and track some things on a daily basis.  I am a problem solver, and metrics, tracking, and goals are part of problem solving.  I look at my log sheets and monthly and then I start to realize I am not a very good problem solver.  Like so many people I let the same things continue to hinder me.  Yes it is stupid, and yes I continue to do it.

Solving the real problems, that seems to be the trick.  Somewhere deep in my brain, there is some broken stuff.  I pride myself in being able to solve problems, but of course I don’t solve the really hard ones.  In so many areas of my life I cannot do the thing that people pay me to do for them.   I am the fat personal trainer.  I am the broke financial consultant.  I am the blind painter.   Code is easy, life is hard, and change, change is a mystery.

photo credit: Head in Hands via photopin (license)

A long time ago, a developer starting coding up a new project.  His name was Frankenstein.  He was a clever developer, but not that clever.  He wanted to prove how clever he was, that was the first sign he was not all that clever.

He journeyed the vast reaches of the internet.  Through StackOverflow, and even the dark reaches of Reddit he journeyed.  Cleverer JavaScript he would need for this project.  He wanted to impress the others in his Meetup group after all.   He found some libraries, he watched a YouTube video, he repeated the lines from the potion that the master had uttered.  His Bower.Json file grew larger, he was powerful, the greater his potion, the more drunk with power he became.  He could bend JavaScript to his will and he did, the DOM be damned, he was a developer, he could manage this.

As the code grew, he was lead further down the stack, soon he was on the server.  The server was easy, he had programmed before.  In his journeys he had heard the languages of the foreign masters, their languages with different grammar, different incantations, seemed mysterious, alluring, he could not help himself.  Into his text editor, he uttered these languages, mixing them with his own.  A Shakespeare of coding he was, he could bend language to his will.  His project grew larger, more complex, he stopped understanding all of it, but that was ok, it was on a development server.  Nothing bad can happen on the development server, it had served as a mighty cage for his abominations in the past.

Soon his project started doing things that others would call unnatural, the clients however were happy.  They did not have a debugger, error reporting was turned off.  A true developer never shows his error logs to the clients, lest they ask the mighty code knight to abandon his quest.  The beast was contained, it was at home in a dungeon.   There was still time to train it, to break it to his will.

Alas a courier arrives to the might developer Frankenstein.  The clients for home he began this quest have new requirements, while reasonable, the code monster is not ready for these challenges.  The message from his clients show their confidence, they are ready to launch soon.  Time is no longer Frankenstein’s friend.  He must move faster.

Faster and faster Frankenstein codes.  He adds packages, he cowboy codes, not a unit test to be found.  His code works, but he is not sure why, the client’s won’t catch on, there is no time.  The abomination of code is out of control.  He utters the phrase in muted breath as he types “Git Push Origin Master” his monster is now “Master.”  All that remains is to deploy, and deploy he does, the clients cheer, the day is saved.  His code monster is in production, and his database grows.

Frankenstein is a lazy hero however.  Resting on his laurels, he does not nurture the code beast, he allows it to be neglected.  Over time this warps the monster, he is subject to outside forces, a version behind, a year behind.  Soon Frankenstein’s monster is not his, it belongs to the hackers, to the past.  He returns to retrain his monster, but it is too late, the monster no longer answers his call, he forgets the commands to bend it to his will.  Frankenstein’s code is on the loose, there is no longer any hope.

He cannot fix the code, for he has not Perl Scripted in 2 years.  His shiny JavaScript Framework has lost its luster, abandoned for the new framework du jour.  His patrons are angry, their champion has failed them, they now must rely on a monster, that over which no mortal man can reign.  Frankenstein retreats, it is not his fault, there was not time, there was not budget.  Frankenstein moves to another project, another monster, this time it will be better he tells himself.  I am Frankenstein, you are Frankenstein.  This time, it will be no different.

photo credit: Frankenstein via photopin (license)

I have been working the last couple days on setting up a bit more of a normal routine to my day.  Freelancing can lead to daily schedules that are borderline insane.  As I was working through how to spend my days better, the subject of education continued to creep up.  How much time should I spend on upping my skill level?  It is a fact that I am far from being the software developer I would like to be.  Programming is a profession where more time can always be spent on learning more languages, frameworks and technologies.  My brain seems to be hard-wired towards wanting to learn more.

The concept of going back to college, outside of financial considerations, really appeals to me.  Spending all day learning and researching seems like a very fine way to spend my time.  So there are some pure inclinations behind wanting to spend time educating myself about my profession.  I have reached a point in life where I am not ashamed to admit, that I am in fact a nerd.

So as I spent time working through this daily scheduling, I kept finding myself coming back to the subject of education.  I just wanted to find a way to schedule in good time blocks every day to learn and get my skill level to where it should be.  But at the end of the day, multiple hours spent learning are probably no longer a realistic option.

Learning does not pay the bills.  But it can help.  There is no doubt that being more skilled makes you a more valuable and dangerous asset.  So where do we distinguish between too much and enough.  Education can be such a tasty way to waste time.  At face value it is good.  Then it becomes excessive.  There are so many other tasty time wasting treats.  Networking, Research, Brainstorming, Meetings.  The list can be very long if we go on and on with it, but that would be a tasty time wasting treat as well.

Education is intellectual laziness.  Education is safe, it’s clean, it’s sanitary, it’s also very artificial.  Education teaches the mechanics, not the art, the execution.  Without the art and execution nothing you learn in any class, workshop, or degree program will reap a full yield.  “I am just learning”… “I am just getting started”… these are sayings that come with education that allow us to use learning as a shield for not acting, for not doing the things we really need to do to get what we want.

In the hands of many education can be the perfect shield. More research, more skills, just more of more and THEN I will get started on things.  It becomes very hard for others or ourselves to pass harsh judgment on another for researching too much or time spent on learning.  That is what makes this education shield so dangerous.

This education shield can remove deadlines and make success much more subjective than it should be.  And with no deadlines and looser standards, then we can become very lazy.  At the end of it all we can say “It didn’t work but I learned a whole lot.” When we say that, sometimes we are just hiding our laziness and distracting ourselves from the truth.

Today as I write, I am faced with two options in my own life.  On one hand, I am currently learning the Laravel Framework for building websites, so I could spend all day working on that.  On the other hand, I could spend some of the day prospecting and doing sales activities to find more work for myself.   If I spend all day learning, no one will really say anything, and I can justify it in my eyes and yours too.  At the end of the day though, I am doing all this to build software for clients, and the only way to get such projects is to go talk to people.

The best answer is spend some time on both.  What that mix of time is, I really don’t know.  That ventures into optimization and efficiency, which is another thought for another day.  I do know one thing that if all I do in a given day is research and go through tutorials, despite what anyone would say I know I was being intellectually lazy.