Two-Year Anniversary Special
28 August 2022
Today, August 28th, 2022, marks the two-year point since I began writing this blog. I wanted to write a special entry to celebrate the occassion, taking a look back at these last 2 years, and then talking about what I have planned for the coming years.
I'm only realizing it now that I sit down to write this: these past two years have probably been the biggest, most eventful, most trying years of my life. Two years ago was August of 2020; at that time, I was about to begin my final semester of my Master's program in Computational Linguistics. I was struggling with the feeling of not being truly passionate about the field I was entering, and subsequently the dread of not knowing what I was going to do professionally upon finishing school (a feeling still present in my life now).
In these last two years I've also moved house — a lot. I went from living in the house I'd grown up in and lived for 25 years, to moving to a new house with my mom for a few weeks, then moving to Indiana with my girlfriend, and then moving to a new place in Indiana half a year later.
Needless to say it's been pretty stressful. On top of the moving, I started an actual job which I've been working at for about a year now — I'm working as an NLU developer for Cerence, a company which develops voice assistant technology for automobiles. We train machine learning models that handle speech input from drivers — things like "Can you raise the music volume?" or "Please open the driver side window." But I don't work on the models directly; I help to supply artificial data for the models to train on, or fix bugs that customers report via tickets. All in all, it's good experience, and I'm glad I was able to do it for as long as I have.
I moved away from all of my friends and family, too. Now I live, as many people jokingly say, surrounded by corn in the Midwest. Jokes aside though, I can't say I hate it here — though I fully expected to. My girlfriend and I came here so she could pursue a graduate degree in psychology. I was reluctant to come along, but I'm glad I did; it's been a positive experience overall.
We've had our difficulties, for sure: relationship issues to overcome, dog ownership struggles (FYI: Dachshunds are terribly stubborn), a lack of friends, and… sometimes, boredom.
There's less to do in Indiana than there is in New York. Well, I guess it depends on how you look at it, but I'm certainly used to more shops and parks and attractions and beaches (not that I always took advantage of them all).
But, to be honest, I've warmed up to life here. I've made a few friends — mostly fellow dog owners I meet outside — but nobody I feel comfortable enough to fully be myself with, yet. I've also developed some new hobbies. One day, I visited the local gun range. It was fun, so I went back a few more times. Then finally, I purchased my own. So I shoot guns now. Yep.
There are still things I want to do, and some things I've wanted to do for a long time that I can't seem to bring myself to do. I'll save that for later on in the post, though.
I started this blog mainly to document my projects (I think). My first post was about my first experience with web development. I think at the time, I had planned to delve deeper into web stuff; that didn't happen. I still have a general interest, and I enjoy learning little tricks I can do with front-end design that I can implement on this website, but I don't think I want to devote a lot of my mental resources to it going forward.
The blog quickly became another avenue for me to journal. The very next post was about minimalism and my experience with it, which is something that I still place a lot of importance on in my life now. Then after that, I talked about my struggles with perfectionism — which is when I think I started to focus more on my creativity (meaning, becoming aware of my need to be creative, but recognizing the way my mind prevents me from doing so).
After this, I wrote some more posts documenting projects I was working on (when I had the energy to do them).
So the way I see it, this blog teeters between 3 subjects (can you have a 3-dimenisonal teeter-totter?):
Perhaps a stretch, but I might even say that these three things operate in a sort of cycle. My lifestyle (e.g. my full-time job and lack of energy to develop an exercising routine) sometimes prevents me from feeling creative or having ideas. This lack of creativity (and sometimes perfectionism) prevents me from starting projects — either because I think it won't turn out good, or because I can't think creatively.
If this is on the mark at all, you might come to the conclusion that the third item in the list — the computers and technology — is the end goal. So maybe I need to treat it as such. Another aspect of my perfectionism-born struggles is the indecision surrounding what I want to be doing with my time. I certainly don't feel fulfilled presently, and I have an inkling that I want to pursue something else, but I'm not sure what. I wouldn't be surprised if it's something in the field of technology/computers/programming, but even then, I don't know what it is. (Game development perhaps?)
Right now, I consider myself as jack of all trades in the realm of computers and programming. I know a bit about a lot of subfields, but I can't say I'm a master at any of them. And my ever-present indecision prevents me from zeroing in on one of those subfields (say, back-end web development for example) and honing my skill.
Not surprisingly, for someone who can be labeled "generally anxious", I spend a large portion of my time thinking about the future. I say it's not surprising because this is one of the hallmarks of anxiety: an eye toward the future (usually characterized by a sense of dread). While I'm no stranger to dreading things to come, this isn't the point of this entry.
What I mean to say is, I think a lot about what I want to be doing, how I want to be spending my life, and things I want to have — whether it's physically (like a house) or more abstractly (like habits).
Initially, I was going to separate Part II of this post (side note: I think I want to start calling them articles) into two subsections like I did Part I: one section for my life in general, and one section for this blog. But I think the future of both of those things are (or will be) very intertwined.
When it comes down to it, I want to write more articles, and I want them to cover the Three Keystones (as I just decided to call them): lifestyle, creativity, technology. In fact, I think I might revise the tagline under my name at the top of my website to reflect my new outlook on the site. But my point here is that those Three Keystones are what I want to be focusing on in my life, generally. I think if I keep them in mind in my daily life, then the articles I write here will have more substance (at least in my mind — if you already think of them as substantial then that's great).
But let's talk a bit about the future in some detail, already. Come on.
As far as my professional career goes, I want to… feel like a professional. At something.
I can't say I consider myself a professional at my current job. To be clear, I guess I should define 'professional' in my own terms. More accurately, I guess I want to be recognized as 'masterful' in some field, trade, or skill — particularly so that I can leverage the proficiency into a career. Whether I enjoy it on a daily basis, all the time, regardless of my mood or other external factors is neither here nor there. Having that expectation is probably unrealistic. I would rather be really, really good at something to the point where I am considered indispensable to some body of work or group of people; I think from that applied proficiency I'd gain some fulfillment in my work regardless of whether I viewed my job as a day-long playtime session.
I'm not sure why I just launched into that offense against the classic "if you enjoy your job, you'll never work a day in your life" advice. It's almost like I felt like you assumed that I felt that way, that I need to feel like my job is a game all day every day. So I got out in front of it before you could say anything. Do you feel stupid? Ha.
The takeaway here is that I don't currently feel fulfilled nor do I feel like I'm a professional. And I desire both of those feelings. My hope is that over the next few months or years, I'll get closer to professional fulfillment. Spoiler: some of the ideas that I think might help me get to that point are coming up next.
As I've very likely mentioned on this blog at some point, I'm always coming up with new project ideas and wanting to do 10 different projects at once. Putting aside the overwhelming decision paralysis I face which prevents me from starting on any of them, when I am doing a project, I feel really good.
So as you might have guessed, yeah, I want to do (and complete, and document, and share) more projects. Part of the joy of working on a project for me is being able to share it with my friends and family, and sometimes even strangers if I can find a relevant subreddit where some weirdos might appreciate some oddly specific piece of software I've written. Most of the time though, it's my friends who I'm sharing them with. And this is a nice segue into my next point, which is:
Games.
In my last article, Creativity, I talked a bit about how I was always interested in game development as a kid. That interest has always stuck around, and I'm often thinking about ideas for games, but I never took one of those projects seriously enough to bring a "real" game to fruition, or at least one that I consider real, complete, serious, etc.
So I think I'm finally going to start taking that more seriously. My friend Evan, who has made a cameo in at least one other article of mine, has similar dreams of making games (they could be of a different or genre or style than my own ideas, but the point is that we both want to create them). We do take a lot of inspiration from the same types of games, since we played a lot of them together growing up — most notably, Pokémon Red/Blue, Silver/Gold, etc. But we decided that, since we've both experienced a lot of wanting-to-but-not-doing in the game development realm, that we'd collaborate on a small, kind of silly, "get the ball rolling" game project together.
One game we co-created when we were probably 8 or 9 years old was a board game called Sicachuwama, pronounced [sɪkət͡ʃəˈwɑ̃meɪ] for all you linguists out there. And don't ask why it's named that. Maybe the official lore will be released one day, but for now, proceed in blissful ignorance.
Anyway, it's a terribly simple game where the goal is to get to the finish line of a linear board before your sole opponent does. There are some other little details that I won't get into here, but the main idea is simple. We decided that it was the perfect board game to recreate as a video game — simple mechanics, simple goal, simple artwork, and (probably) relatively short as a project.
So this is our plan: we will use Godot, a free and open source game engine, to recreate our 20-year-old board game. Step 1 is to learn the basics of Godot via some tutorials. Step 2 is to make the game. Step 3 is to release it on Steam (yes, really) for free. I'll keep you updated in the coming months.
Another (solo) project that I have planned, and is technically already in progress, is a home server build. I think I'll be naming it 'Eagle', a tribute to my high school networking teacher, Mr. Sean Hughes. A great man. The class was administered by Cisco, and in their curriculum was a server (which they… provided schematics for, I guess?) called Eagle Server. (Side note: going forward, I want to give names to all the computers I build. I should've done that from the start, so I think I'll retroactively name my original gaming PC from 2014 right now: 'Oak', after the professor of the same name.)
Back to the server build. I plan to use it as a file server, a HomeAssistant server, and uh, other things. I'm not sure yet. See, mainly I just wanted it to use it as a NAS and a HomeAssistant box, but I quickly realized that it'll be a great platform for learning about new things I previously didn't have access to: Plex, game servers, running a bunch of VMs and Docker containers, PiHole for network traffic monitoring, and other things I probably can't think of.
So as far as hardware goes, I'm planning on using an amalgamation of my old PC parts, new old PC parts from eBay and elsewhere, and new new parts (the storage drives, mainly). I don't want to get too deep into the specifics of the build because (wow, another nice segue!) I will be documenting the process. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I plan to write an article about the build and my experience using it afterward. But, a new thing I want to try is filming the build and editing some sort of documentation/time lapse video for my YouTube channel. Just for fun, really. I don't have concrete plans or aspirations to become a "YouTuber", but I like posting videos on there occasionally. In fact, one day I'd like to try vlogging (Remember when vlogging meant video blogging? Now it means hanging out in your YouTube mansion with your influencer friends and streaming hot tub content on Twitch together). Anyway, maybe one day I'll just pick up my camera and talk to it. We'll see what happens.
So, I guess that's all I have for you. This is certainly my longest article thus far, and I guess that's appropriate being that it's meant to commemorate two years of this blog. Thanks for reading this article, and if you've been around since day one, thanks for reading the other articles, too. I appreciate the support, for real, yo.
Here's a little bonus for those of you who made it to the end. I recently scanned two books I wrote when I was a kid, and uploaded them to my website. The links have only been available in my Discord server until now.
Here they are, for your reading pleasure:
Until next time.
— Derek Andersen