One of the things I’ve started to think about lately is how to maintain or reignite the desire to push in my personal projects just like I do in my projects at work. What I’ve been struggling with is if I spend all my energy at work, how do I find the thing to energize me in my side projects that are the passion projects. This starts with my prior post on managing mental health and finding balance. I have been thinking about how I get back into writing, and how I get back into reigniting the balance required to developing side projects to learning new ways of trying to solve problems in a less restricted space.
Finding Purpose in Sharing Knowledge
One of the things I’ve started to dig into is why I want to push and do this additional side project, sharing what I’ve learned in my experience, both recently and over my whole career. There is one sentiment that keeps coming back to me, I want to help others have a better experience than I have, and if I share my guiding principles and path for creating solutions, then I have done well by making the world a better place than I found it.
I have been talking to a couple of mentors about getting into a program at work that is designed to help Engineers who are performing to help them and become the generation of expert engineers. In this, I had to do an exercise that I already have found invaluable, who am I in my heart of hearts. The answer I came to is that I have a passion for helping others and making things better in the communities I participate in. This is why I am always putting myself out there and offering frameworks and not simply trying to solve the immediate short-term problem, instead focusing on the long-term why a symptom is happening and trying to solve that instead.
Finding the Little Milestones
More recently I have been thinking about my setup on this blog, but also the way I am operating within this space. I have talked with a few colleagues who have checked this out, and I have taken some advice from them to grow this platform. The first thing I thought about and implemented was enabling the ability to sign up for a newsletter. This sounded like a great idea that was easy on the surface to implement. That is why you now see the ability to share posts and also the ability to subscribe to a newsletter.
This led me to the next thing that made this feel more real and I didn’t realize how much it has helped me: creating an email using my domain! I spent a week or two reviewing my options and there is an option to use Google Workspace for a relatively inexpensive price. This led me to fight with it for a week, but I finally got it working. I finalized it on Monday, creating a logo, a new gravatar profile, and creating groups that make it feel real. For me, that was the key phrase: “feel real”. I didn’t do this, in this case, to try to monetize, in an effort for accolades, I did it for me. I looked at my Google Workspace account page and just the sheer amount of joy it brought has energized me.
Adjusting Plans Based on Desire
Another benefit this reflection has brought is the conclusion that rewriting an existing solution isn’t energizing for me. I struggle with it because I have solved the problem in a way that performed well and was fit for purpose. I realized in doing the exercise on why I do things, I also know what I am passionate about, which is to solve problems. I have noticed over the years for me, that once I solve a problem and my task becomes using the same pattern for slight variations, I become disinterested and lose interest quickly. I have an internal drive where I need problems that are different and can figure out how to solve them. This has led me to find a way to merge two interests of mine: tabletop roleplaying games and software engineering.
I’ve slowly gotten back into doing roleplaying games, specifically Dungeons & Dragons. The thing I realized is I am out of practice on the more interesting side of the game mechanics for me, the roleplaying. Injecting myself into the shoes of this made-up character, knowing their history, knowing their strengths and flaws, figuring out what they would do in a given scenario including the element of luck of the dice rolls. As someone rebuilding my roleplaying abilities, I thought about how it would be nice to create a space to do focused small-scale scenarios and then describe what a given character with some very basic info would do if they rolled the dice and then describe the action and the result.
This seemed interesting to me and I also play with some friends using Discord, so we are remotely playing with each other. What if I translated this to an online game of sorts, where you can run micro scenarios with your friends, do secret rolls of a D20 dice, and then someone has to guess your roll based on how you describe what they did. Having something online would be nice because this would work great with my group. It would also lend itself to some data point tracking, where you can track the overall results between sessions and see how they might improve. I have started building out some thoughts on user definitions, and user profiles, and designing how the initial user and game would work. this could also lead to an integration with a Discord bot that this would attach to, allowing complete integration with a virtual environment.
What does this all mean?
I hope that this can help give some insight into why I am writing these posts and articles. I love giving back to the community, and I also love to give guidance to those who might be struggling with finding the path forward. Bringing order to the chaos, whether it’s internally driven, externally driven, or a bit of both, is one of the things that fills me with pride and joy. I also wanted to share the power of reflection and really dig into the purpose and mission. This is to me the element that helps me stay driven. Also, I wanted to share the updates, why they happened, and what is coming on the horizon.
I am looking for ways to build communities, and one of the things I’ve also started structuring is a community for developers in which we can talk about side projects, get input, share cool things we’re doing in our private time, and offer to help others who are looking for it. If this is something that interests you, feel free to reach out to me and I will be more than happy to talk about ideas.