Inertia

Something I have been struggling with recently in the conflict between two forces. One being the inner creative desiring to design, innovate, and create novel ideas, concepts, and products. The other being the inner critic injecting doubt and exposing flaws within these ideas. Unfortunately, I'm a better critic than I am a creator and thus the standard that must be reached is higher than if I was less self-critical of myself.

Normally, I wouldn't have an issue with this, but I have been feeling rather stagnant for the past few months and would like to re-capture some of the creative momentum that I may have had in the past. I mean at one point, I was writing almost daily for a few months for 0 cent payouts. Unfortunately, once you stop it is really hard to start up again. It doesn't help that work is often very draining of my willpower. I've been in a creative rut for a while.

Eventually you have to start again somewhere, so here's my attempt to re-establish some creative "momentum" in the way of some musings on prior momentum. Apologies for the simplistic image, but even those were getting in the way of writing, so abstract minimalism will have to do.

There's nothing like being a motivated and hungry writer (or thinker). You can write for hours over any idea and explore different branches of that idea and if you're lucky discuss those ideas with other people. Some of the mechanics of Steem used to appeal to me in such a way. To some extent they still do, but often those discussions have turned into arguments that few folks are willing to have and many folks who did engage with them have quit or gone silent.

So, I don't really like to talk about Steem anymore. But given that was a key area of interest of mine, my productive output decreased by a significant portion as I tried to move away from that topic. Also, my ambitious side wanted to prove that this platform and myself could be successful talking about things other than Steem. So much to the point where I still have multiple drafts about different criticisms I still have about Steem unpublished. I guess I was tired of always shining the negative light even though I was never really convinced of arguments on the other side of the aisle.

I do generally enjoy talking about technology, how things are designed, and philosophical questions that software might bring up. As a developer who been recently been moved from a more creative design-oriented position to a less creative implementation and configuration heavy position within my job, I am definitely more fond of the creative, higher level work rather than implementing and configuring someone else's vision (especially when that vision is not very extensible or developer friendly).

But its kind of hard of talking about things in a vacuum. I was tempted a week or so ago to write an article on technical debt since I have uncovered quite a lot of technical debt in the project that I'm working on, but I thought better of it when I found the best example I could actually talk about in detail is Steem and technical debt isn't a positive subject. So, I decided not to write the article, but I'm sure that people who understand what technical debt is would agree with me in that Steem has a lot of it.

I been trying for a while to start writing Rust code again. We were using Rust at work prior to the huge shift that happened a few months ago. Now I'm stuck with C and all of it's wonderful problems. In my opinion, Rust is one of best languages in terms of providing a development environment for the modern developer. The modern developer being a recent graduates that may not necessarily know the fundamentals coming out of college of forcing them to work within a certain paradigm in order for their code to compile. You can still write shitty code in Rust, but it's much more likely to be technically correct.

Unfortunately, I haven't quite found a compelling project that I really want to work on within Rust. Something to do with that high standard or something like that. Unfortunately Steem isn't written in Rust, or I would actually dedicate time to learning how the actual blockchain works and would help look for bugs. Although, I might be less inclined to do the second part as I spend a lot of time doing with the younger developers I have to work with. And I'm still in my 20's which means I'm dealing with very little experience overall with good coding practices.

But in the meanwhile, I am going to attempt to be a more active writer. And it should be easier since nobody reads this stuff anyways, right?