I’m not sure if anyone is even reading this site any longer, but whoever is, well, it’s time for an update. Over the past year I have set about to spend my freetime on generally more useful things. I set some general goals for where I wanted to be in life. Mainly, I wanted to address my chosen career and challenge myself to understand what I really wished to be doing. My career had been surfing on assumptions and stale promise.
You could almost say I made a resolution to address my career. Looking back at the post, it’s amazing to see how closely reality has followed that screed. Have I completed SICP? No, though I have cracked the book. Have I joined an open source project? No, but I think I’ve done something analogous and even more exciting.
Over the past five months or so I have been working on a couple different web applications. The first application is in stasis. The group of folks I was working with have varying levels of commitment and we jointly decided to revisit the idea after the New Year dawns. It’s a great group of folks and I’d love for everyone to regain the initial drive that brought us together. On a personal level the project already served it’s purpose, getting me into an empowering new programming language and framework, Ruby on Rails. And of course the process served as a catalyst for me to continue where the others have left off.
At the end of October I began working on a vastly different web site with my good friend, Nate. Our goal is to take the kernel of an idea that began with our smalltime blog and build it into a community site focused on reading, writing and workshopping.
Scrawlers.comWhat will you be able to do on Scrawlers.com after it launches? You’ll be able to write 100-word stories. You’ll be able to read 100-word stories. You’ll be able to give writers notes on their 100-word stories. You’ll be able to do all these things in a low-stress environment. You’ve always wanted to write - what easier way to ease into the process than writing tiny stories. Heck, use a flash fiction technique to remove the hurdle of time.
So here I am. My habits have changed drastically. I pick up a video game perhaps one evening every other month. Netflix is wondering if I’ve died. Socially I’m a bit of a hermit - not something I want to continue forever. Yet some of my habits are eerily similar. I’m no longer addicted to politics, news and sports blogs, but I now have a raving addiction to web startup, design, and creativity blogs.
It’s interesting to look back on that original post. I did not know where the road would turn, yet somehow I am on a path that combines both computer science and written creativity into a single entity. And I could not be happier.