About Me
Hi. My day job is building software for people who pay me to build software. In the evenings, I build software for people who don’t pay me to build software (myself included). I mostly write about building software on here. That probably doesn’t come as a shock.
Latest Post: On AI
I’ve been watching a lot of woodworking YouTube lately. The trope of software engineers taking up woodworking as a hobby is well-worn, and the consensus seems to be that its parallels to building software—combined with the physical tangibility—are attractive after spending so much time staring at a computer screen. But I don’t believe that explanation wholly captures the phenomenon.
I don’t think what you dislike about programming for a living is necessarily that you spend all day touching computers. I’ve seen burnout described as being a result of a disconnect between what you’re actually doing—day to day, hour to hour—and the aspect of your job that you feel is important and that you want to be doing. If you’re building a coffee table with your own two hands it’s harder to be disconnected from your work than if you’re spending all day developing a headache trying to explain why introducing a second, parallel onboarding flow for a small subset of users will only precipitate further headaches down the road.