In order to grow they say you have to push or be pushed out of your comfort zone. Who they are and when they said this is unclear. But, it seems relevant when I think about it from the ecosystem or genome system. Quick note on the usage of genome here - I’m using it the context of “The entire <SPECIES> genome.” and the idea’s I remember from bio in the 90’s about punctuated equilibrium.
Together these ideas tell me that change through growth occurs rapidly after a long period of relative stagnation. I know, not an accurate metaphor but I hope you get the idea I’m trying to convey about individual growth. For myself, at least where I find myself today, in the past year I found myself with few and little change to my learning. After a very long time of investing in UI, front end and browsers ad being on teams that also invested in learning about, using and staying up to date with advancements in that space it was a different place to be in.
Over the holiday’s it became clear that something had to change but I’m not one to change something just to change it. There is no sense moving from one environment to another just to move when there are no guarantees that the grass is greener and the magical learning fairies will start sprinkle their learning dust on me again. So what to do? As Roland (of Deschain) would say, ‘Think, think for your fathers sake. Think for your mothers sake.’ Good advice.
So I thought about what was missing and the number one thing that had gone away was curiosity. I wasn’t curious about my work or the tools I was using to do my work. The people around me didn’t seem to be curious about the tools I use and that have become important for mastering the creation of good user experiences on top of the browser. What this led me to was a conversation with someone outside of the work I do who is curious, but not about frontend or browsers. But they are curious about code ans systems and there is a really interesting opportunity there to spark curiosity there.
Dive into a different language that I haven’t really used deeply before. Dig into an area of software that relates to my current role so I learn , on the side, outside of the day to day. And finally, pair up with another curious mind so I can learn from what they learn and teach them what I think I know when they have questions.
All of that said, writing python is a little weird. After writing TypeScript for so long, writing un-typed code seems un-natural. When I write out the code, especially functions, I keep wanting to add in return types after the colons.
