My first post

Author: shanemcd

content/posts/2025-03-22-my-first-post.md

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+---
+title: My first post
+---
+
+## Why I made this website 
+
+It's been a while since I had the time or cared enough to maintain a website for
+myself. As a software engineer, I found that over time I gradually lost interest
+in using a computer outside of work. 
+
+That made me sad, because I am truly grateful to be paid to do something that I
+had at one point spent countless hours doing in my free time. After enough time
+had passed, I began to reflect on the situation and try and start to understand
+what had happened. The answer seems simple now - I had stopped learning for the
+sake of learning.
+
+When acquiring new a new skill, almost every day is filled with
+first-encounters. Especially so with programming. The amount of information
+required to begin understanding how software interacts with underlying physical
+hardware is more than enough to keep you busy for multiple lifetimes. But people
+tend to achieve a level of proficiency that allows them to carry out the task at
+hand and then stop learning. 
+
+This is understandable - there's only so many hours in the day and there are
+other things in life to care about. It's largely what happened to me. Once I
+started making enough money to pay the bills and support my family, I felt less
+of a need to learn things outside of what it took to accomplish the immediate
+tasks at hand at work.
+
+Writing code for a living was enough to keep me mentally stimulated for more
+than a decade, but once I started taking on more leadership responsibilities it
+didn't take long before I felt my skills begin to atrophy. 
+
+This is something I have heard people more senior than myself talk about my
+entire career, but when it started happening to me it felt terrifying. If I lost
+my ability to do the thing that had gotten me to this point in the first place,
+how long until I'm no longer useful to the people I'm entrusted to lead?
+
+This may all sound a bit melodramatic, but it's been gnawing at me for years
+now. I just haven't have the time, energy, or ability to do anything to change
+it. I still love my job - and it was never really an option to go back. I found
+(and still find) it very rewarding to have more of an impact than what I could
+achieve by only writing code. However, somewhat fortuitously, the less time I
+had to do what I truly love at work, the more time I was willing to spend my
+free time searching for ways to reintegrate this passion into my daily life.
+
+## Going forward
+
+I've spent the past several months rediscovering things that I had previously
+lost interest in. Simple things like building computers, installing operating
+systems, configuring my desktop environment, and tweaking my favorite text
+editor. It's been a lot of fun, and going forward I am going to write about them
+here. This will mostly be a form of self-therapy and archiving for the sake of
+posterity, but I'm going to do this publicly in the off chance that someone else
+finds anything I have to say interesting or useful. That's it for now. Thank you
+if you've decided to read this far, and have a nice day.