14 years ago I sat in my homeroom, feeling pretty aimless, not knowing what to do with my life.
I had quit swimming, quit show choir, really let my grades slip and started to doing the bare minimum. At that point I had fully accepted I wasn't going to university. Journalism was the thing I enjoyed in school, but I knew I didn't want to be a journalist and my time with that is for a different post.
My high school was fancy, a public school, but a fancy one, starting in 2008 every student got a laptop loaned to them for the school year that you could take home. I sat on that laptop scrolling through Hacker News. It was and is a website for nerds in tech and one of the few websites not blocked by our IT departments aggressive content blockers. I scrolled that site most mornings but this particular day it was a coding bootcamp that showed up.
The pitch was simple, intensive training for 8 weeks in New York or San Francisco. If you get accepted there's no cost, just a percentage of your salary for a year after you find a job.
I liked making things and I wanted to be making things right now. As soon as possible. I already was on that computer to the fullest extent I possibly could. I loved it. I could do that for money. I could do that and get to see New York City.
I wanted to make something then and I want to make something now.
What I got excited about almost half my life ago doesn't exist today. Software developers exist, don't let anyone tell you differently. The work done by software developers is just not the same and it's slowly killing me. We still get to have the idea, we get to see the output, but we don't get to make it anymore. It's the difference between making a pizza at home from scratch and designing a pizza on Dominos.ca
AI has fundamentally changed things. Some people are very excited about that shift. I can't help but look around and, well, it's bleak. I'm not alone in this. It's caused us as software developers to outsource the fun part of our jobs. Sure we got to outsource the not fun parts as well, but the trade off in aggregate is that it's far to common to find burn out coming faster and faster.
All of that to feel like I'm not even making something.
I want to make something, I'm going to make something.
Now to figure out what that is.