Keeping the spark alive ✨

As I mentioned in the summary, I am looking to reignite the spark of software engineering. I quit my software engineering job in 2023 to travel around the world.

Fast-forward 1.5 years later and I still do not have a job in the industry. I’ve managed to travel because I have a loving and supportive partner who has taken on the financial burden (I also saved diligently while working). Also, thanks to Shopify, I’ve been able to pick up a lot of freelance work. I haven’t had the ambition to get hired even though having a job would be nice. Part of that reason is because I do not like the idea of being on the production line and never creating my own thing. Reading the book Career Advice For Software Engineers by Chris Vilanueva revealed that I have indeed lost the spark. It’s not the industry that is the problem, it’s that I’ve lost the drive that I once had. Therefore, I am looking to build things from the ground up. I want to re-create the wheels of Software Engineering. What I loved about Software Engineering was creating something at my fingertips. Also, being able to fully dissolve myself into the problem space, where you make new connections that you never knew existed.

I cannot remember the number of times I read the acronym D.R.Y (don’t repeat yourself) during my university lectures. It certainly has it place; software is used to automate processes. However, the context in which it was applied during university was “don’t re-create the wheel and use something someone else has built”. This is why so much of the software I used was “magical”, because I never built it myself. It’s why I am learning C again. I want to build my own hash-map data-structure because I want to know the consequences of doing so – if you try to build a hash-map in C you’ll understand them. I’m busy reading the book, Algorithms by Robert Sedgewick and implement the data-structures/algorithms in C, I was previously doing this in Go, but I find that if I truly want to understand what is going on under the hood, then implementing these in C will not only be super challenging, but rewarding.

Once I have mastered these algorithms and data-structures in C, I will pick some technology that I’ve taken for granted, such as a webserver and implement that in C. I want to understand the technology I use and perhaps that is why I started to lose the spark. It is because I was relying on so much other software that I didn’t believe in myself, because I always had a sneaky suspicion that if these software tools did not already exist then what I was building wouldn’t exist because I didn’t know how to create a webserver or a JS Framework – not because I couldn’t build them myself, but because I never tried (I believed that you shouldn’t).

So, here’s to creating things from scratch, because that’s how you learn, that’s how you improve what already exists. If you understand the solution you can improve it or implement it again.