Over the last 15 years, when it comes to writing online I have basically only ever focused on one topic: WordPress, and everything tangentially related to it. I think that’s not unusual, after all “online” for people in the technology industry is so associated with their profession that it follows that most sharing skews in that direction.
It’s very easy for a career in technology to mean it’s all consuming. The line between personal hobbies and professional is intermingled for people who aspire to be to successful in their field. Conference speaking, blogging, hack projects, open source projects all mean a significant amount of my personal time, identity and focus is drenched in the industry.
To make significant progress in your career, or attempting distinguish yourself in a field may take this amount of dedicated and focus. It’s been a 20 year journey for me, that has meant technology was initially virtually everything I focused on. After 15 years or so, I got a family and had to prioritize my “all encompassing” obsession with technology and the industry accordingly.
This transition went smoothly enough. I found that having kids meant I was naturally less interested in staying up all night coding, or following every twist and turn in the web development space. This resulted in a more healthy balance between “work life” and “personal life”. For many people, personal life is work life. It’s not that all “life is work”, it’s more than tech is both work and personal.
This is a learning curve that most twentysomething-into-family-personal technology people go though. Finding other interests completely detached from tech has helped me get perspective on work stresses and whatever the fire of the day may be.
One such thing for me is woodworking. It’s incredible what you can learn from YouTube and the web, and put in to practice. Here’s a chair I recently designed and made from teak wood for the upcoming summer where I plan to spend as much time outdoors as possible.
I’m sharing this because I made something that I’m happy with and proud of. And, it’s just for me. I don’t have a client or customer paying for it, adding stress to every possible wrong turn in the creation process.
I got into building software because I liked creating things. The professionalization and monetization of that thing definitely took away from the joy of creating in the long run. Creating something where you just get to enjoy it is a great feeling.
