Where it all began
Most blogs of this nature consist of one post, before being abandoned with a mountain of good intentions to come back to it.
For that reason, I should try to make my initial post on this blog as good as I can. I’ll begin by explaining who am and where I am in life.
Having turned 40 this year, I was a Software Engineer working as a contractor for SMEs and sometimes corporate giants, usually with a big government institution as the end client that wrote all the cheques.
The work was lucrative, that’s for sure. I described it as golden handcuffs, because it was plagued by frustrating aspects, through to down right ridiculous blockers to productivity or success. I could write for days about various anecdotes that highlight how bad things are, but let’s just say it was the epitome of the UKs low productivity crisis.
Huge sums of tax payer money would have slice after slice taken off them by pointless middle layers, to eventually make its way down to me, and a team consisting of equally jaded contractors, or overly green junior devs who were hired on the back of their degree in Chemistry, with the idea that they’d probably pick things up, just so long as they’re billable.
Agile scrum is universally hated, but it’s completely out of the question to dare deviating from the neat structure that makes the spreadsheets align nicely. Java is the only language that exists, because some people might not know another one. Locked down corporate IT provides you with a thin client to a virtual windows session that was created with powerpoint and email in mind.
Consider a delivery driver, who happens to personally own a brand new long wheel base transit van, with a parking garage, sat nav, safety features, even a uniform and waterproof boots. But, in his actual job as a delivery driver, he’s told he has to use the van provided. It’s loud, inefficient, the tyres all have slow punctures, the indicators don’t self-cancel, the engine randomly doesn’t start, the windscreen is cracked, you get the idea. Here I am at home, with a mechanical keyboard, huge monitor, gigabit internet, a full Jetbrains license, a powerful PC with linux installed, in my own quiet office at home, with an Aeron office chair, a whiteboard, adjustable lighting. Well, I HAD to use the provided office, IT, hardware, and it was every bit the 20 year old flat-tyred Citroen Berlingo with a radio suplerglued to blast Aqua’s Barbie Girl at 100dB.
Once we’d figured a way to get a laggy RDP connection to a dev box running a corporately approved ISO image, we’d work on the ancient bloated legacy codebase that was originally created based on a misconception of future requirements, but nevertheless can’t be re-written in a single sprint, meaning it can’t ever be re-written.
We’d deliver a steaming turd of bloated tech-debt ridden crap, just so long as we can say we’ve closed the ticket, and the look of confusion and despair in the face of a Project Manager when the devs suggest we need to re-do it, because “… but… we’ve told the client that’s been delivered”.
I kept daring myself to just quit. The issue was I had some clearances that relied on my being an obedient 40 hour per week worker bee, to avoid it falling into a black hole of undefined administrative nightmare that I never really had explained to me properly. So, taking a break for six months might have meant an eighteen month hiatus while someone moved my name from one column of a spreadsheet to another.
Fortunately, after asking to be removed from an email list that was pushing radical progressive ideological talking points, I got given the axe from my most recent position, and that was all it took for me to make the decision to go for it. Leave that world of misery behind, and try my hand at working in the real world.
Already, I’ve started reading again, re-learning the maths I forgot at school. I even dusted off my treadmill and managed 800 meters before my heart felt like it was going to explode. I’ve began learning all the tech that I was never allowed to use previously, and of course, started a blog.
It remains to be seen what exactly I’ll use this for, but there’s so many ideas that I come across that I’m fascinated by, from philosophy through to css frameworks, and this will be a meaningful way of organising my thoughts, even if the only reader is a search engine web crawler.
The future
My goal is to earn a living, for the rest of my working life, with my own independent efforts.
That will inevitably come in the form of a SaaS to begin with, but who knows what the world will look like in five, ten and twenty years from now.