ReedyBear's Blog

Re: falling out of love with coding by ava

In response to falling out of love with coding | ava's blog:

I go back-and-forth with myself about coding, but our interests seem quite different.

There's something I deeply love about it. I have a passion, and I ruminate about software ideas, and solutions to complex coding problems.

Initially, I got into it to develop Missing Droid, a very early phone-locator app for Android. It was a so-so idea, but I thought it brilliant at the time.

And I feel you about uncontrollable devices - it's not up to me whether somebody has their GPS turned on.

Or things outside of my control - Google kicked me off the Android app store 3 years later for spyware concerns, without an adequate appeals process or literally ever speaking to a human about it. I would have had to sue them in California, over 1,000 miles away.

I've chased down many a bug, worked around some, and created more than I could count.

But for me, bugs are exciting. They pull me in. They're not always fun, and they can really piss me off if I'm in a self-imposed deadline. But even then, my mind will reel about them; I need to solve it.

I think part of it for me is passion, but part is also compulsion.

I'm a long way from my Missing Droid days. (visiting archived copies of my old forum is something special)

For the last few years, I've built open source software. A huge array of tools to make programming easier, or to solve specific problems I had, or to make an easier to use or "better" version of something already existing.

And I made a backend-framework. I tried not to use it, but found my current version of reedybear.com was insanely more complex and difficult to build without it. So I'm working on converting it back to my framework.

I fight with myself often about whether I "should code or not".

There is a passion (& probably compulsion) for coding that drives me beyond what I understand.

But what keeps me in it (so I tell myself) is solving real problems.

First, locally. 5 years ago, I voted for the first time in a local election, and I literally could not find a list online of who was running for office.

So I started a website around it, but then I went entrepreneur journalist about it, tried to make it into a creator-business & do real reporting.

My original vision was just to catalogue information I can hunt down, but it turned into so much more.

Mental illness put a stop to that effort 9 months ago (both the code & journalism sides), and I've just found myself coding again in the last 2-3 weeks.

And the software problems I want to solve have only grown since then.

Here are some of my ideas (for website libraries that I'll open source):

And I have so many more ideas. Almost every single one (even the bad ones) feel really important and like I need to make them. Sometimes I find an existing solution that actually checks all my boxes, but it's not very often.

So what keeps me going is the dream of solving real world problems with my software.

But the hell hole I'm stuck in right now (and for the last several years) is made of a few parts:

I'm trying to be better about rabit-holing. Trying to keep a more focused track this time around. I didn't code for the last 9 months because I had a mental breakdown in December.

I didn't know when I would start coding again. But the itch caught me one day 2 or 3 weeks ago, and now I code for an hour or two most days. I'm loving it. but I also worry it is fruitless and pointless, and that there are better non-software ways for me to work toward addressing democracy and information-related problems.

So idunno. Sometimes I think that software is batshit stupid and we should have frozen it like 15 years ago. We had office text editors like 50 years ago, I think & we've had email for a long time too.

And working with your hands or face-to-face in your community is great. When I do woodworking or repair, it's rewarding and good.

Idunno. Rant over. Thought I'd have a better conclusion, but I was wrong.

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