Last livestream was a lot of fun and got me into a Nerves and hardware mood. You can catch it here, we put text on small displays and a bunch of other stuff. Was pleased to know the Inky library still holds up, as that was what got me started in the community.

If you like Nerves and want to follow what is happening in that blessed land you might be excused to have missed that I'm the editor of the Official Nerves Newsletter. That's a fun labor of love which has less wordcount typically than this one. You can also binge the archive since we feature cool projects that don't really age out.

I'm going to take that mood and pour it into a newly arrived Pi 400 and we'll see if we can get that working with Nerves. It "should work", sources say but to my knowledge no-one has tried it. So that's today's livestream at 13.30 CEST. Get ready to watch by subscribing on the Youtube Channel.

Regular Programming episode 11 is out and we spoke about observability.

You don't have to like it, but I do

I will preface this with saying that I don't believe you have to be passionate about programming to do software development or care about tech to be working in it. A job can be just a job and you can do fishing and frisbee to find your joy. That's not my perspective though and it isn't how I got into tech, programming or my career. So this is squarely in the camp of what works for me and makes me tick.

The way I stay engaged with programming seems to be variety and creativity. I'm not well suited to go into one single piece of tech and go super deep. I've gone deep-ish on many different things just due to time and repeated exposure but breadth first and top down seem more like my way. I ingest a ton of concepts, tools and try to grasp the potential of them, try to do things with them and over time synthesize what I like into my day-to-day tools.

Having recently revisited my old hardware project that got me into Elixir via Nerves really reminded me that when I'm knee-deep in delivering client work I am almost always in a situation where there are human-system challenges, time constraints and pragmatic limits. That is where I prove my professional capacity, to myself and ideally to my clients. It provides a good challenge and a proving ground. It isn't where I find most of my joy.

Making pixels blink to life on a piece of hardware. Now that's joy. Making a silly thing with a JS 3D library, that can be joyful. Building something tightly with what I consider the exact right tools, that can be joyful. Making absurd design choices for entertainment, that can be joyful. None of this typically belongs in client work.

To be quite honest, if I had the audience to sustain myself as well doing just creative experiments on video and in blog form I would try that in a hearbeat. But client work is still something I enjoy and it pays well.

If you've been in tech for some time and you came to it with enthusiasm I think it's easy to end up a bit jaded after a while. I have a hard time getting excited about smartphone tech. I have deep frustrations with most hardware and how consumerist, proprietary and terrible it gets. That doesn't mean I no longer like tech but it does typically mean that I might not be scratching my own itches and finding the joyful parts.

Branching out into things that are novel is a great way for me to find some new joy. Or going back to something cool that has been set aside that I actually love doing. I have some Nerves projects I still want to finish and I think that fits the mood I'm currently in.

So I don't have a ton of spare time. So when do I do this? Well, I don't commit 100%  full time to clients, explicitly. They know this. And the time I reserve typically provides me time to write this, engage a bit with the communities I'm in and experiment. And I think that's where most of my learning and growth happens. I can polish my production grade skills with clients but the way I typically acquire new skills and learn is in side projects.

Oh, and I'm constantly thinking about these things. That's not great, but it is true. I can't remember a time when I wasn't solving problems in my head. When I just learned PHP at 15 or so I would work out code I wanted to write on paper because computers were a scarce resource in class. The advent of the smartphone makes this habit worse/better since I can easily look things up. I have to very intentionally stop background processing of this stuff when  spending time with family or friends. It is either a life-long habit or just my wiring. At least they don't have to listen to it.

The upside of this thinking is that when I actually sit down to do the thing I often already know what I want to do with my limited time. So doing a livestream with the eInk screen was a random idea and I don't remember how I got it. But that lead to the idea of creating an eInk calendar gadget. Which is almost done (?) and typically what I'm hacking on when I can spare an hour. And now I've ordered more fun displays, and might actually have a bash at implementing the Inky Impression into the Inky library. The ideas feed the ideas which feed the ideas.

I have way more ideas for livestreams than I have time to livestream.

But finding new joys to be passionate about seems to be the lifeblood of what I do. So yeah, you don't have to be passionate about tech to be a programmer. But I do.

Are you driven by passion? Do you know where you find your joy? Is it at all in tech? Don't hesitate to reach out via lars@underjord.io or on Twitter where I'm @lawik.

Thanks for reading, I appreciate the attention you spend on here.

- Lars Wikman