Can I change the way I program?

2025-05-08

I’ve been out of the software game for a few months now (by choice) and it’s been a valuable time to reflect about my career, skills, what I like and dislike about the industry, what kind of company I would like to work for in the future, etc. I could and should write more blog posts about this.

One thing I’ve been struggling with is getting some motivation back to work on side projects. I feel like I’ve finally reached JavaScript Ecosystem Fatigue Syndrome (JEFS). I’m bored of the arguments, the keeping up to date, the unnecessary complexity of solutions. Don’t get me wrong, JavaScript puts food on my table and I will probably continue using it for the rest of my career, no issues with that. I’m just bored of it. I need to make programming fun for myself again.

I used to think that becoming a specialist was the best thing I could do for my career. I’m sure it’s a very lucrative path for a lot of people. But in my experience, the best engineers I’ve worked with were very solid generalists. They were able to solve problems confidently in all levels of the stack and weren’t afraid of technologies they weren’t super familiar with. I want to be like that.

I’m creating a curriculum for myself to challenge they way I build software in the entire stack. I want to focus on technologies that:

• I don’t feel like I’ve mastered
• have a slow pace of change
• will teach me other fundamental concepts or tools

What I’ve come up with so far:

• Golang: a language I’ve worked with before but didn’t get to feel like I was fluent in it. I enjoy its simplicity and how there’s one good way to do things. My initial goal is to get to the point where I can confidently build web apps and I’m familiar with a large part of the standard library.
• Docker: I’ve used Docker in most jobs, but mostly existing setups. I want to get good at making my own images, improve my local development setup and learn more about networking.
• HTMX: after living in Single Page Application -land for almost a decade, I’ve learned to appreciate the beauty, the simplicity and the timelessness of a good old web server that spits out HTML, CSS and maybe some JS scripts. I want to focus on using the browser APIs, learn more about web security and take a break from the React way of life.
• NeoVim: this is a big one, but I think it’s the extra spice that will make this fun. I’m not after the street cred of being able to say “I use Vim, actually”. Working with the terminal front and center will help me learn more about bash, command line tools, grepping, awking, seding, jqing, etc.

We’ll see where this journey takes me. But at least it feels fun and exciting, 2 words I wouldn’t have used to describe my job in recent years.