- 08 Dec, 2025 *
So you may have figured out from my posts that I am some sort of programmer. One with the ‘senior’ rank ascribed to it even. But I got here pretty quickly, even though I’ve been into programming since around 1998.
What’s the deal?
As again if you are a reader of the things I put here, in this place, you may also figure out that I don’t stick with things long enough for them to become deep. This got "worse" when I entered a relationship (worse isn’t the right word but you get my point). But this remains. I did my CS degree and touched on the deeper things of programming but not that much. Then I started post-grad. Aside from programming language design, I let the world of non-academic CS pass me by. Why? Well, the PhD was hard enough (especially with a…
- 08 Dec, 2025 *
So you may have figured out from my posts that I am some sort of programmer. One with the ‘senior’ rank ascribed to it even. But I got here pretty quickly, even though I’ve been into programming since around 1998.
What’s the deal?
As again if you are a reader of the things I put here, in this place, you may also figure out that I don’t stick with things long enough for them to become deep. This got "worse" when I entered a relationship (worse isn’t the right word but you get my point). But this remains. I did my CS degree and touched on the deeper things of programming but not that much. Then I started post-grad. Aside from programming language design, I let the world of non-academic CS pass me by. Why? Well, the PhD was hard enough (especially with all the other things going on) and I just never felt an urge to care.
Why now?
Since I left academia (and had more mental health things happen) and got a job as a ‘software engineer’, this has been brewing. Firstly there was getting to grips with how the business world operates. Secondly there was learning to deal with more of a flat hierarchy with many more people (my PhD time was me and 2 others...). Then there was just getting back into "normal" coding, which was something I hadn’t done for quite some time. After I while I started catching up, albeit without much effort, and was rewarded (double edge sword there).
After almost 5 years in this job and something has started to break through: I really like computers and programming and nerdy shit.
The problem is that I was away from it for so long that, well, I have to play catchup.
Where to start?
The problem with my brain is that I like to absorb the behaviours of people around me. My team is uh for lack of a word, somewhat apathetic when it comes to programming outside of work. There’s a couple of other guys I talk to about it but they also don’t do that much. This is how I started the first iteration of my homelab in 2023. It was bad, docker-based, and very centralised. It was looking for a problem with a different solution. I gave up on that for a while because I just stopped caring (and it became a bit too cumbersome).
A year-ish later I came back with the same goal(?) but also trying to learn FluxCD (at the time were going to be using that instead of ArgoCD but that changed a bit). That failed mainly to me never being able to get ingresses to do what I wanted.
I also started coding little random things. I finally made some OSS contributions. Bit by bit I started catching up.
So now where am I?
I’ve been mucking with homelab v3 with Terraform/OpenTofu and Ansible, doing random coding with Rust, and (attempting) to make more OSS contributions. I also bought a bunch of books, which I really should start reading. I’m also engaging with things I probably would have wanted to learn like 20 years such as how linux and other operating systems actually work.
Intentional learning. I found the joy in it again. Let’s see how long it lasts.
Thanks for reading! [Wanna discuss?](mailto:byzxor@tuta.io?subject=Re:I am playing catchup)