💾 Archived View for tilde.town › ~insom › 2024-05-02.gmi captured on 2024-05-12 at 15:30:33. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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2024-05-02

Noticing a habit I have: when I am not being innately productive as a programmer I do infrastructure. If I am feeling sick or unmotivated, I'll set up CI, rebuild a server, configure Traefik -- just general futzing with the artifacts of software. This is an okay failure state: in many cases these things need to get done. But I've noticed then when I am being a productive developer, all of those things go by the wayside.

I racked a new server in the basement a couple of weeks ago and I got half way through setting it up but then I started really kind of "getting" Rust, and so I have stayed with programming and let the ops stuff slip. I think, deep down, I know I can always come back to ops with any energy level, but having the right combination of motivation and time and practice to actually improve at programming requires me to put programming first.

That's all: no big point here, just some pattern I noticed about myself, while I am currently setting my own schedule. When you're working for other people it's harder to notice these things: because you can always say "this needs doing now to unblock person X or feature Y" but I think -- looking back -- I've always had this pendulum between ops and software development and I lied to myself a little about why I was prioritising one or the other.