Tomorrow is my 26th birthday. I've been alive for more than 2 and a half decades. I've achieved many things in this time; the vast majority of them have not been what was expected of me, but they have invariably what I expected of myself.
My wants and needs have varied wildly (to me) over the years; I'm not sure if this is the norm, but since I was a kid, I've known at a high level that I want to do something with my life that 1. satisfies my intellectual curiosity and 2. helps people, but that has taken many many forms.
I've liked computing since I was a child - my first foray into it, that I was reminded of recently while talking to my tweenaged cousins, was piracy. As many early 2000s kids did, I had various handheld game consoles through my childhood, but they were metered (in my young opinion) unfairly by my parents. This filled me with enough wroth to figure out how to emulate these games on my computer, and started me down a very long rabbit hole once I realised how fun it was to be able to solve my problems if I just thought about them hard enough.
I've been coding since I was about 14 (which you might note was before software as a career became as lucrative as it is now). I started because again, I loved gaming, and I wanted to learn how to make some. I had already some experience making Pokemon rom hacks, but these were with community tools that only allowed a subset of possible changes. I wanted full control, so I started from scratch with a C++ course online and Python through Codecademy. This solidified my desire to do this for my whole life; I really, really love it when I see a problem and know that with enough grit n time, I can solve it, at least for myself.
As evidenced by the other posts on this blog, I obviously have kept this going. However, the above really doesn't capture my other goal in life: to help people through the work I do. This is unfortunately a throughline; in my late teens, I started realising that I could essentially only solve my own problems and found that nothing I did really helped the people around me. I started planning around this - for a good year or two, I was convinced I was going to go into teaching at public schools. I can't say for certain when I decided to go back to my original goal of being an engineer, because it was gradual as I finished my diploma and went through my military service; it was very likely not helped, though, by my darling mother (a teacher of 20 years) telling me in no uncertain terms that I would be a useless teacher and had no chance of makig a difference in that field.
FWIW, I do disagree with her. Although I didn't go into it as a career, I still find the time to share whatever knowledge I have accrued with anyone who I feel can benefit from it, and I do think I have made an impact in their lives. Does it still ring in my ear? Of course it does; but unfortunately, until my early 20s I have never had anyone be supportive of me or my dreams including my parents, which is of course a blow to my base self esteem but ultimately only makes me prouder of what I've done.
So back to software - it feels insane to say, but I've basically become one of the people I idolised. Within two years of full fledged software development, I've ratified my years of tinkering into an ability to design complex software systems that (unfortunately) is better than most people in my field. This rate of developmt and background does suck, because I have basically no peers anywhere I go - my team now are all between five and ten years older than me and in different stages of both their life and their career.
This is good and bad; it motivates me to work harder and present myself better to get to places where I can learn from the systems and people around me. This has led to some dead ends, but as my girlfriend always says, at least I'm still putting blocks on the tower.
This ramble leads to the main reason I wanted to write this today on the bus to work - AI. The sense of accomplishment I get from building software has somewhat diminished over the years, and though the models have gotten good enough in the last six months that I get to focus more on what I love (designing solutions) rather than what I previously had to do to get there (remembering syntax), it's just tiring. Every programmer or engineer can relate; being able to focus on one specific thing until its done is pretty much gone.
I work pretty much 12 hours a day now, and I don't think it's a bad thing - I learn so much every day, and I'm solving real problems. But. Where will I be in five years? Ten? With how serpentine my life has been this far, I really just don't know. See ya tomorrow