What’s going on in my life right now? Not totally sure, to be honest. I’m having a lot of fun, but the time is absolutely flying by. I’ve been a something else at Metal Toad for about half a year now. Technology Consultant is my current title, but it sounds like that may finally be changing, which is amazing, because people don’t seem to understand what that means, and it’s a little bit clunky to say out loud.

There have been a lot of successes as a something else. I absolutely feel like my abstract, architectural chops have improved dramatically. Additionally, my comfort level talking to folks of all backgrounds about technology has increased. I actually got to write, build, perform my first conference talk recently in LA – that was possibly the most rewarding thing I’ve done so far at Metal Toad, and I’m incredibly grateful that the organization shipped me out, and that Tom Martin encouraged me so much to take the leap.

I suppose I miss the long open spans of development time that I used to have. My programming at work is scattered, piecemeal, and not very deep. I do what I can, when I can, and it usually feels like not enough. I miss the satisfaction of writing code for code’s sake; personally solving abstract problems; absorbing arcane tricks. Should I go back? Can I go back?

I feel like there must be some middle ground. Surely I can carve time for purely code-level growth and exploration in the middle of the professional, whirlwindy world of the something else. More personal projects and more contributions, perhaps. Or more blog posts. Maybe just taking the time to dump some ideas – sure feels like the right thing this morning, anyway.