I’ve never worked as a professional software developer before, but I have had some days where I’ve spent some long hours working on a project that made me wonder, “Is this what it would be like?” In general I don’t mind working, hard, and in fact I enjoy it. When I was studying music in college, I spend many many hours practicing the piano. I honestly didn’t mind it at all. It felt good to learn and make progress. I was gaining new skills and new insight all the time. It helped a lot that there were other people around doing the same thing. Even though practicing piano is mostly a solo activity, it’s inspiring to have a lot of your friends around doing the same thing a few doors down in another practice room.
Programming is mostly similar to that, but there are a few key differences. One of them is getting blocked.
Getting Blocked
I spend a fair number of hours in the last week being completely blocked in my progress. The more hours that go by in that state, the sadder it gets. Occasionally that sort of thing would happen to me as a music student, but it’s not quite the same. If I’m working on a piano piece and I get stuck on a passage, and I can always go away from it and work on other things and come back. But in programming I’ve had the experience where it seems as though I can literally make no progress until I get past a particular hurdle. That’s what happened to me last week.
The worst part of being blocked in that way is that sometimes when you finally figure out what the problem is, you realize that it is a really stupid problem. That’s what happened to me last week. It was the equivalent of turning the power off and restarting something (the android emulator needed to be restarted). But it wasn’t something I thought of doing, so I was looking in every other nook and cranny, trying to find the answer. The silver lining is that next time I am in the same situation, that will be one of the first things I try.
Staring at My Screen
During those long days, I spend hours sitting in front of a screen, and sometimes I wonder what that might do to my health. If I manage to transition into a career as a software developer, that will be something I’ll need to really think about. I have struggled with my weight ever since graduate school, and having a sedentary job is probably not going to help that much. I will definitely have to make a conscious effort to get physically active during the day, whether it be by standing up, going for walks, or whatever.
My hope is that, with a good job that allows me to make enough money that I don’t have to work on the weekends or in the evenings as much as I do know (see my previous posts), I might be have more time for physical activity and other things for my health, such as cooking better foods for myself.
Taking Care of Myself
This is going to be key for me in the long run. I have a young daughter, and I would love to live a long time. I wasn’t feeling too confident about that before I started on this path. But I am more hopeful that I’ll be able to take better care of myself after making career shift. I just have to remember that the career change alone won’t make me healthy. I’ll need to make good decisions, which hopefully I will be in a better position to do, once I am able to improve my work-life balance. At least that is my hope.
