Schwartz.World!

I don’t know if it was the COVID-somnia, the COVID-epression, the COVID-xiety or what, but I have just not been feeling work lately. I haven’t felt excited about what I’ve been doing for a while, which led me to applying for a senior dev position, which I got. It’ll be nice to do something new.

Pontification

I’d like to write more about my journey to becoming a senior developer. I’m completely self-taught. If you’re flipping through this blog staring at my opinions on development, thinking “this guy has no clue”, that’s cool. I’m doing my best, and a lot of people seem to think I know what I’m doing. I think a lot about the right way to build software, and I want to write about what I’m thinking. Really I’d like to talk about what I’m thinking with people who are as interested in this as I am, but there’s a lot of ways to get excited about tech and I don’t feel like I know anybody who really thinks about programming the way I do. I’m pretty sure that my loved ones would struggle to explain what I do, even though it seems very simple to me.

I’m not talking about making code beautiful, although it can be poetic. I strive to maintain a mental model for whatever I’m working on. I need to carry the whole thing in my head, and I can only do that if things are factored properly. How can we build the code so that we have to work less to retain that mental model? It doesn’t happen right away, but code is like a chair that you sit in until it conforms to the individual contours of your ass.

When state changes, I don’t want to have to wonder where that change is coming from. When something needs changing, I don’t want to have to touch 10,000 files to make that change. I want to look at a function and know what it’s doing, without having to figure out how. There is no code that perfectly fits this, and deciding which tradeoffs to make is a delicate art.

Sleep Update

Sleep eludes me, as usual, but a little less than before.

I still hate the CPAP machine. I hate fiddling with it, cleaning it, waking up with it on. I hate the way it fills me up with air like a balloon. But more than that, I hate that I can feel it working. I don’t know what that means for my future. Will I be sleeping in a mask forever?

When I first started I had to wear the mask before bed for a couple hours while watching TV to get my compliance numbers up, but we are 2 months in and I now average around 5.5 hours of sleep with the mask on. This is a fucking miracle and nothing less. I had one night where I made it 7.5 hours.

My motivation is returning. That’s the most amazing part. I’ve been running and coding and reading. Schwartz is coming back in a big way. Get ready, people.