Dustin here, it has been a good while since I did any internet publishing, but I am starting fresh, re-aligning my priorities and goals, and starting off in a new direction.
Today I want to talk a bit about the multiple meanings of independence. I'm going to focus a bit on trying to navigate different forms of independence that I've grown to recognize as healthy and good in life and career, and some forms that I'm increasingly seeing as toxic. I'm also going to daydream a bit about the future.
But first, where have I been???
It's been nine-ish months since I wrote on this blog. Sorry about that, I've got good reasons.
I've been a Drupal developer for nearly the entirety of my professional web development career, spanning the last decade. Ironically though, since I first published my own personal website, I don't think I've run it on Drupal for any significant amount of time.
Decide, move, do something. We have to figure out how to solve this problem. There has to be a way to make this work, we have to deliver on what was asked.
Except, we don't always have to do that.
Far too often we forget what might be the best option at the current moment, and that is simply to do nothing.
Couple of weeks into full Quest 2 ownership, I was not expecting to like doing VR stuff quite this much. I have been into sim racing (mostly Dirt Rally) for a few years now and wanted to take that experience to the next level, but honestly, I am spending more and more time using the other experiences. It is surprisingly fun, despite the draw backs of the hardware. I’ve been getting stuck staying up late doing weird crap like pretending to be a motorsport mechanic in the game Wrench, changing people’s oil, coolant, transmission fluid and tires.
I've recently started learning C# and Unity in my spare time to learn the basics necessary to create VR applications. I was initially intimidated by the idea of learning C# because I always assumed C derivative languages, especially statically compiled languages, that are often used for desktop application development would be incredibly hard for me to pick up. After all, they'd be so different from what I was used to.
I just shared this quick anecdote in a Slack group I am part of, and I realized its actually kind of important to who I am as a programmer. I might expand this into a full post at some point, but it was too long to post to Mastodon or Twitter, so dang it, here it goes on me blog!
What I love about PHP is it forces almost nothing, but allows almost everything.
I often get hung up on doing activities because I can't determine the exact "right" way to accomplish them. If I can't do them perfectly, I often just don't bother. I also often start projects I don't finish because I don't deem them 'good enough' to share with anyone. What I am often forgetting, is that getting praise and adoration from my peers isn't the only reason to do something, sometimes, its just good to do stuff for the sake of doing it, and seeing what happens.
Sometimes the greatest pains can lead to your biggest breakthroughs. Without the pain of Windows Vista, I may never have become a FOSS-loving web developer.
