One of the things people always ask you as a teen\u00adager, or in job inter\u00adviews, or when you\u2019re con\u00adtem\u00adplat\u00ading doing some\u00adthing new, is: what do you want to do? And the ques\u00adtion\u00ader is often dis\u00adap\u00adpoin\u00adted when you don\u2019t have a barn-burn\u00ading deeply-held spe\u00adcif\u00adic desire just wait\u00ading there. Answers that are more gen\u00ader\u00adic (albeit equally import\u00adant), such as \u2018some\u00adthing inter\u00adest\u00ading\u2019, or \u2018some\u00adthing use\u00adful\u2019 are some\u00adhow unsat\u00adis\u00adfact\u00adory, even when coupled with a gen\u00ader\u00adal idea of the area in which you want to do some\u00adthing use\u00adful and interesting. <\/p>\n
This morn\u00ading I read From \u201csit still\u201d to \u201cscratch your own itch\u201d<\/a> and it\u2019s full of descrip\u00adtions of expect\u00ada\u00adtions for pro\u00adgram\u00admers that res\u00adon\u00adate with me, such as the expect\u00ada\u00adtion that \u201ca REAL<\/span> pro\u00adgram\u00admer or a REAL<\/span> open source con\u00adtrib\u00adut\u00ador is sup\u00adposed to be a self-starter who comes up with their own pro\u00adject ideas from the start\u201d. The art\u00adicle has some tech\u00adniques to stop these expect\u00ada\u00adtions from being over\u00adpower\u00ading or intim\u00adid\u00adat\u00ading. The author sug\u00adgests, for example, that writ\u00ading Yet Anoth\u00ader {Some\u00adthing Simple} is fine, just like sew\u00ading an item from a pat\u00adtern (or in my case, knit\u00adting it). You learn from that, and expand your knowledge.<\/p>\n In my case, mov\u00ading from pro\u00adject man\u00adage\u00adment back into more tech\u00adnic\u00adal work, what helped was work\u00ading through online tutori\u00adals until I was far enough along to be able to start writ\u00ading my own use\u00adful stand-alone pro\u00adjects. Some\u00adtimes I\u2019ve sur\u00adprised myself by how much tech\u00adnic\u00adal know\u00adledge from 10 or more years ago comes back, like wak\u00ading the tech\u00adnic\u00adal brain up again that was dormant for a while. I guess, for me, that was the itch that needed to be scratched.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the things people always ask you as a teen\u00adager, or in job inter\u00adviews, or when you\u2019re con\u00adtem\u00adplat\u00ading doing some\u00adthing new, is: what do you want to do? And the ques\u00adtion\u00ader is often dis\u00adap\u00adpoin\u00adted when you don\u2019t have a barn-burn\u00ading deeply-held spe\u00adcif\u00adic desire just wait\u00ading there. Answers that are more gen\u00ader\u00adic (albeit equally import\u00adant), \u2026 Con\u00adtin\u00adue read\u00ading \u201cExpect\u00ada\u00adtions\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1171"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1174,"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1171\/revisions\/1174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.laurenwood.org\/anyway\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}