I use a sort of intermediate approach for my personal site. It's just stored as html files in a git repo, and I do write the html by hand for pages that I want to put extra love into (e.g. an annual year-in-review post to share with family and friends). You wrote something in your original "Writing my own damn HTML" post that captures a big part of why this appeals to me: "I see my website as a sort of self-expression project - kind of like a zen garden..."
But handcrafting html is inconvenient to do frequently, so for more ordinary posts I write in markdown and use some custom scripts and pandoc to generate html. For me this approach is more fun than using a static site generator and less annoying (because I spend less time figuring out why an upgrade randomly broke something, or how to make the SSG do things I already know how to do manually). But the only reason it hasn't devolved into a full hand-rolled SSG is that I don't need/want much consistency across pages: there's no shared nav bar and I don't try to keep the styling or layout of older pages in line with newer pages.
For me personally, the effort of 'polishing' a post makes it drastically more valuable to myself in the end: I think harder about the material; I notice problems with my thinking that I would have glossed over otherwise; I explain things in ways that will be more useful/legible to me-five-years-from-now.
Committing myself to publish posts is, in part, sort of a motivational hack to get me to do the polishing. The possibility that someone else _might_ read it and judge me for it pushes me to put much more effort in than I would if I kept it private. (I wrote a short blog post on this: https://brokensandals.net/personal/reviews-as-notes/)
I probably wouldn't see this as a sufficient reason for blogging if I believed that _literally_ nobody would _ever_ read the stuff I post. But it is a significant benefit that's available even if I only have a very tiny and sporadic audience.
I do this too—every post has a footer telling people they can email me with feedback, along with a mailto link. I maybe see one piece of spam every few months because of it. And once in a while I get feedback that I really enjoy. As the top-level comment mentioned, there are advantages to 1-on-1 communication.
As a fellow fan of effective altruism, I really don't want people to think of it as the group that shows up whenever someone is asking for help and says "Don't help them! You should be helping these other people instead!"
Empathy is crucial for motivating people to give to any cause, and it's a crucial part of why I'm involved in EA. If someone's first/main exposure to EA is along the lines of "you should ignore this cause which touched your heart, because numbers", it's not going to resonate. I want people to be excited about the good they could accomplish by donating to EA-aligned charities, not feel like I'm trying to press some distasteful obligation onto them.
Also, it's not a zero-sum game in practice. People can be inspired to increase the total amount they give (so giving more to effective charities doesn't necessarily mean giving less to other charities they care about).
I have a blog, but I mostly assume people _don't_ care what I'm doing or thinking. Some of my posts have probably never been read by anybody. I still personally find it worthwhile for a few reasons:
- The mere possibility that someone will see it pushes me to put more thought and effort into what I write. Sometimes this reveals weaknesses in my ideas that I would have glossed over if I were just writing private notes for myself; sometimes it leads me to actually change my opinions. It also means the blog posts are easier for me to understand / get value out of than notes are if I come back and reread them years later.
- It creates opportunities for people to connect with me which can pay off at unexpected times. Occasionally people have reached out to me to say a post helped them or resonated with them, or to give a thoughtful reply or ask a question. Those sorts of interactions are really satisfying even if they're rare. (One time, I was interviewing for a dev job and the interviewer asked a question about a post I'd written on the philosophy of John Rawls, and how it could connect to software engineering. I found that absolutely delightful.)
- It's just nice to have an outlet when I feel like writing about something.
At several points in my life I've been so discontent that I felt I had no choice but to try something that felt (at least to me at the time) drastic and risky. This has included:
- pursuing romantic interests that I knew could get complicated
- reaching out for emotional support in ways that made me feel embarrassed and vulnerable
- confessing suicidal thoughts to my doctor
- quitting my job and taking >1 year off work
- moving across the country with no job lined up and no long-term plan
I've never regretted any such decision; I think it's always had a major positive impact on my life. Because when I'm trapped in my routine the world can start to feel very small. To shatter that illusion and remind myself how wide the possibilities in life really are, it's often necessary to behave in some way that violates inhibitions I normally have.
So... taking a break from coding could be a great idea, especially if you can build up some savings first. It doesn't have to be forever (I took ~15 months off then got another software job). You don't have to plan the rest of your life - find a direction that looks promising for the next year or two, and adjust course again as needed after that.
> you can't treat depression by hanging out with other depressed people
I disagree, a sense of shared suffering can be really helpful in building close and meaningful friendships. Connecting with another miserable person who understood what I was going through - and plotting with them about what each of us could do to try to change things - was one of the key things in getting me through one of the most depressed periods of my life.
> Meetups in my area were also only tech-related.
No book clubs or discussion groups or political action or volunteer groups? Maybe you need to move; there should be a lot more than tech going on in any decent-sized city. Even if it's such a tech-focused area that lots of the attendees happen to work in tech, you'll see other facets of them at those events; people have passions outside of their careers.
Not sure why this is downvoted. It is well documented that the most demanding activities lead to the strongest and most enduring relationships. War is the most extreme obvious example, but at college students who participate in demanding sports or band or those competitive business groups have far richer social lives in general than those who join casual clubs. In adulthood careers like medicine where people do gruelling shift work together results in again in more enduring and close bonds than in your usual 9 to 5.
It is perhaps an inconvenient truth but share suffering and struggle is the "secret" here. Why do you think childhood friendships are generally the closest ones a person will have? In part because of the intense earnest struggle to figure things out. Which is what brings people together far more effectively than shared happiness or some vague feeling of social dissatisfaction.
It sounds like you've been able to consistently land dev jobs, produce working software (it's not your responsibility to ensure the thing you've been asked to build is commercially viable), and build a good reputation (you mention good feedback and promotions), plus you've made a ton of money (most people make way less money than software engineers, and the average software engineer has not gotten a lucrative stock windfall). I think you've been very successful :)
> It's been a couple months and I have achieved nothing.
At my first software job it was said that a new hire typically wouldn't be a net positive for the team until they'd been there a year. You wouldn't necessarily have even been given a real task in the first two months, let alone gotten it shipped. Big companies have bureaucracy and gatekeeping (for good and bad reasons) and operate on timescales of months or years. By design, a new person can't unilaterally be productive. It's possible that investing the time to empower you to be productive just doesn't seem urgent to them right now - dealing with the fallout of a manager leaving may be much higher priority. You're on the payroll, they know you'll be around for them to utilize when they need you...
> If I can't work in the tech industry it would completely upend my entire life.
Based on what you've said, this fear sounds very unlikely to come about. Even if this company is dysfunctional and you need to move on, you have a history of being able to get tech jobs, and it sounds like you've made a positive impression on many coworkers in the past, so I imagine they'd vouch for you. And there's a ton of demand for developers right now, and a wide variety of companies to choose from!
Reminds me of the tale in this podcast [1] where the guy's desire to avoid a difficult conversation spiraled into totally ghosting his employer for two weeks.
It's a really tough tendency to fight. One thing I think is helpful is to acknowledge failure as early as possible. If meeting the deadline would require me to work faster than normal or make some heroic last-minute effort, I've already failed, even if that deadline is still a long way out. Admitting that to myself and others now, so that expectations about the future can be adjusted, is a much smaller blow than admitting it weeks or months down the line. And it means I only have to feel a little flaky and underperformant, rather than super flaky and underperformant and also dishonest.
in my experience, if you tell your boss you're not going to make a deadline, their reaction is not "dont worry" but "yes you will"
of course ymmv. had only 5/6 such bosses.
the only one that wasnt like that, was not in software but a little shop selling custom built computers and i was a teenager back then, so that might have made it a little easier on me too
YMMV indeed, I have not encountered that yet, and have definitely missed initial deadlines.
But some things help - when giving estimates or timelines, I go through my usual charade of "they are guestimates, usually you should double or triple them, the further out they go the less likely they are accurate etc".
Also, I promise I will monitor progress, keep them up to date, and let them know as soon as possible when plans deviate. I also discuss backup plans early (cutting features or pushing back, starting with pilots and tests, etc..)
It has worked pretty well for me so far. Not to say it's _just_ about how you handle the situation, you can have a shitty manager, that part is out of your control unfortunately.. :)
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