A Turn of the Tides

The monthly entries weren’t working for me. It was a good way to lift myself back into it, and to get a cadence going, so I’m glad I did it and I’ll keep those posts around. They were fun to write and I’m happy with how they turned out. But I didn’t like the rigid schedule, nor the pressure to keep up that cadence. I didn’t like the amount of time I was spending writing about what I was and wanted to be doing, instead of doing it. And I just wasn’t enjoying myself.

Enjoying yourself is everything.

So I gave myself permission to stop doing that and figure out what I did want to be doing.

I want to restart my software business

Not because I want a business; fuck capitalism. But because the idea of creating from my own ideas, making something for myself, full time, keeps calling to me. Because my body misses the feeling place of it. Because it feels good to think about. Because it feels less good to not. Because I believe I will enjoy the experience of doing it.

Enjoying yourself is everything.

So, “vibes” then. I will be a “vibe coder” (except hell no I will not, keep reading).

Of course those aren’t the only reasons

I have an idea I’m actually kind of jazzed about. I’m still trying to find the succinct description, but for now: what if no Macintosh, no mouse? Where might things had gone instead?

I’ve poked at this idea from a few different directions and I think I have a pretty good handle on what it wants to be. I can see a couple ways to come at it, and the timeframes don’t feel unreasonable. I can see a few different ways I could exchange value for currency, presuming I can find a way to do that without further enriching those who already have far, far too much.

My profession (writing computer programs) has jumped the shark. This isn’t news. In my opinion — the only one which matters here — software development peaked decades ago, before the dot-com bubble, before “agile methodology”, before containers and cloud compute and before the whole industry become a get-rich-quick scheme. Now we have LLMs and some of the worst people in the world smearing their dicks all over everything and I hate it with the heat of a million suns.

I am become an anachronism, and I embrace it. I no longer want anything to do with it.

(IMHO “AI” will shortly be priced out of reach, the funding will collapse, the data centers will never be built and a lot of people are going to have a really bad hangover about it. I will not be sad.)

I’m still sore about how the last go ended. At one point the entirety of my income came from the sales of software I had written for myself: a macOS application named “Musicality” and it’s companion iOS remote, and independently consulting on Premake development for a handful of companies. I fucked up aplenty but so much of what went wrong that time was out of my control — I’m looking at you Apple “oh hey sure let’s rollout mandatory sandboxing without actually testing said sandbox on any actual fucking programs”. I was thrown into a spiral where things didn’t work, so my sales dropped, so I had to consult more, so I had less time to fix things, so my sales dropped. Yeah, still a little sore about that.

I finally have enough spoons in the drawer. The last year — the last few years really — have been about untangling from the brambles and barbed wire into which my life path had led me. Resting, recovering, getting help and doing the work. Figuring out what had been broken and restoring it to working order. Finding my tribe (hi tribe! :heart:). Now I get to experience the dividends of that work. My energy is back, my enthusiasm is back, my imagination is engaged and the ideas are flowing again.

I have conditions

When I was a kid I wrote code and built things because it was fun. I was playing. It felt exciting, collaborative, inquisitive, but mostly fun. If I’m going to do this, it needs to feel like that.

I’m going to make what *I* want to make, because that has always been where the magic happens. I am going to listen to and trust what my body tells me, because when it speaks it is always right. “Feels right” is the metric. An income would be lovely but I’m not going to sell my soul for it, not any more than I already have, anyway. I can always continue slinging non-slopped Java code, or go work at Wawa and get actual employee benefits.

There are more conditions, and I will write them up when they are ready, but those are the ones that matter, non-negotiable and immutable.

In conclusion

I’ve got the ideas, I’ve got the spoons, and I’m going to get after it.

I’m not in a position to drop my client work entirely, not yet, and I rather like my current client so I wouldn’t want to leave them in a lurch anyway. That means it will be evenings and weekends for me to start, which is as it should be, really. But this will be my last client for this lifetime. I feel it in my body and my bones: I am done.

I’m shooting for a three year timeframe (specifically, 2029-09) to switch to full-time, or retire, or become a bog witch, or whatever is available to me at that time. By that date I would like to have something I made ready to roll out to the runway , subject to the conditions above. If I have to decide between those conditions and getting to release something, I’ll walk off into the woods and live happily ever after.

Coming up

One of the conditions I am intending to set is that every [mission] ends with shipping something. This post is the shipped artifact of me making the decision and setting the direction. As I write this it only lives in my Obsidian notebook, but that’s enough for the first step on the journey.

But shipping to only myself is unsatisfying, so next up will be getting these words out of Obsidian and on to the World Wide Web so you can find them and read them and so be entertained. There are lots of packages and projects and plugins that profess to do it all for me, but frankly I’m annoyed with all of you and am probably going to end up using Make and Pandoc and a couple dozen lines of Perl.

Let’s goooooooo.

This & that

Currently crushing on Triptyque: Éclats Cosmiques by MC Solaar. :music: