Kick Off

Having worked as a Software Developer for nearly twenty years, it recently occurred to me that I have been living off the same skillset for at least the last fifteen.  At no point have I even needed to learn new skills - instead I've been maturing my existing ones gradually.  All the learning I have done in that time has been dedicated to the applications I work on and the businesses that uses them.

When I started out I actually did a lot of learning at home.  My evenings were clear from 6pm onwards so I would have time to install databases, experiment with functionality and techniques, and even try out other technologies.  This accelerated my development substantially, just as much as all the on-the-job training I was doing at work at the time.

Then, a familiar story, involving a woman and (later) some children and all the other tedious distractions of adult life (which could be the elixir that turns interesting people boring) .  Plus I can't ignore my general decrease in energy.  In the evenings I'd be tired and disinterested, preferring instead to read or watch TV.  At the most, I dabbled in Gimp or Affinity if I needed to produce something - but that'd consist of a quick Youtube tutorial and I'd shortly afterwards forget what I'd done and how I'd done it.

Now; a change of plan.  I'm going to avoid TV and see if I can learn something new.  Most of my youth was cheerfully misspent, and some of that heedless mis-spending was done sat in front of an Amiga, drawing terrible graphics, composing terrible music, writing terrible code, and marvelling at the terrible results.  If there was one theme, other than than my magically high-level of consistency at producing low-quality work, it was that I never finished anything.  But I enjoyed it, partly as I was able to quickly tap and satisfy the limit of my creative abilities - how many people are able to say that?

So onto the challenge.  Can I learn new technical skills? Do I have any creative juice? Can I stick at it and produce something that looks, even loosely, like it might be finished?  Finally, will I still enjoy it?

No idea what I'm actually going to do. Or how. That involves "planning", which goes against my very being as a brute-force developer.  Part of the fun is going through the pain of something tedious, only to find that there was a quicker, easier, and better way to do it. In my usual, hubristic way, I've installed Godot and Blender and that feels like progress of a kind.  Next step, presumably, some tutorials, then I'll see if there are any sparks.