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Taking an extended break from programming

November 11, 2021

In a lot of ways, programming has been part of my whole life.

As a young child, I grew up around computers. I discovered really early on I had a knack for interacting with these strange machines, and soon I was introduced to the amazing world of computer programming. It was a blast! With nothing more than a cleverly picked sequence of characters, I could instruct the gray metal box to produce and display whatever I wished for.

Throughout the years, even as I developed other interests, I spent a lot of my free time simply coding. Now and then I’d think of some cool project to work on, and I’d do my best to make it reality. Not many of these reached any level of completion, but it didn’t really matter. I was having fun!

But time passed, and that pattern never really… stopped. The scope of my experiments ballooned, just as my understanding of computing did, but my ability to actually turn them into results never evolved. I was growing an endless backlog of incredibly cool concepts that got just plain boring to work on long before they were usable. And worse of all, it just wasn’t engaging or fun anymore. I was craving the feeling of a finished work I could be proud of, and I never seemed to reach that point, no matter what I tried.

Much more recently, I noticed another thing that bothered me about my programming hobby. Practically all of my projects were envisioned as tools that would help me achieve something else, but I was barely considering what that something else would actually be. I just had vague ideas, but they felt secondary to what I was doing about them. And so, you could say I invested everything in style and nothing in substance. I wanted everything to work in a cool way and to also look cool, but I didn’t have much to fill the blanks with. And that was a huge problem. It made everything seem like an absolute waste of time and effort. I would have built the perfect pipeline, but what was the point if I still had to find something to fill it up with?

And around last week, all of this reached a breaking point. My most recent project concept was something I kept hyping up in my head; first it was a feed reader with decent typography (something that doesn’t make my eyes bleed is apparently very hard to come by), which quickly spiraled into a universal text rendering framework that I’d be able to embed into my future ideal operating system. It was bananas, and it was making me miserable. I would not be content with anything I’d end up making.

Something needed to change. I decided I would need a good, long break from programming. My free time would be better spent on hobbies of mine with more meaning.

And what truly opened my eyes was realizing how this wasn’t even just a thing with programming!! Experimenting with increasingly obscure and customizable computing environments was such a time sink that I could spend an entire day just fine tuning sway, or waybar, or whatever. It became clear that it wasn’t just a break from programming that I needed; a return to basics was due.

Well, here I am now! From an insane Bedrock+Arch+Void Linux amalgamate with musl+sway, I’ve moved to KDE Neon, a glorified KDE reskin of Ubuntu. It pretty much had to be KDE, since honestly every other Linux desktop environment is just an aesthetic MESS by default. It looks really pretty without any custom styling whatsoever, and that’s exactly what I need right now.

And you know what? It’s not even bad at all! It’s really nice to have an environment that (mostly…) just works, no endless tinkering needed to make it look right. A lot of stock KDE software does exactly what I need it to do, and everything else is straightforward enough to install. I can’t even afford to mind about snap or flatpak; they do the job.

And, of course, this extends to my presence in Gemini as well! As you might have seen in my previous gemlog entry, I had built a custom version of Hugo just to mirror my gemtext over HTTP “painlessly.” That’s gone down the drain! As of right now, my capsule is a manually edited collection of files. I decide what goes exactly where. Why would I need to concern myself with content management when I can fit the whole site structure in my head? Perhaps when I’ve written a lot more I’ll consider it again. But for now, it’s unnecessary overhead.

I’ve also shut down my public_html folder. This means the links in that previous post of mine are now dead, sorry! But it seems pretty pointless for it to be just a mirror of my gemlog; just read it like you’re doing right now!! When I’m ready, I’ll definitely populate it with cool stuff. But the actual stuff needs to come first.

So what now? I definitely want to improve my drawing skills, and perhaps I’ll finally get around to learning toki pona! And if you’ve been a follower of the quest for 糠漬け, then you can rest assured it’s going pretty well… maybe I’ll talk about it soon! But something I can be sure of is that there’s no doomed pet program for me to obsess over. For now, I am free.