This has really been a while… but after 6 months of round-abouting, I have come back to this skeleton of a blog to get its layout fixed and going. A lot of changes have happened in the meantime, the biggest of them what I’m fondly calling “closing boxes”. That is: realising the value that you left on the table. Or, in less corporate-y language, “finishing stuff”.

This post closes the first milestone of breakpoint, which is exciting. But it has taught me something: if you’re not going for a particular thing, ask yourself why. “Round-abouting”, the term that I used in the beginning of this post like it’s common colloquial English. What I meant by it is when you dabble on a bunch of stuff but you never really commit to something. It is normally the symptom, not the root cause. It can be a symptom of:

  • Fear / confidence
  • Lack of sufficient skill
  • Other (often hidden) priorities

Pay attention to your round-abouting, because it will teach you all these things. It will teach you were you feel weak, where you can improve, and what’s important to you. For me, the rounda-abouting took the form of two realisations that I couldn’t be more thankful for: wanting to go back into proper software engineering and “building” stuff. But before that, realising that I wanted to have a more solid foundation than I had before. So it was exactly the last post of this blog that made me realise I wanted to focus on learn before I got my feet proper wet again.

The result? I got accepted into UC Boulder’s Master’s programme ( https://www.colorado.edu/cs/academics/online-programs/mscs-coursera), and I have taken about 7 classes to date. I’m having a blast, and it was directly tied to that one post back in December.

Still, after that long detour, here am I, closing the milestone 0 of this particular box. I’m unsure when I’ll move to milestone 1. I have other boxes (like the master’s) that I believe are more aligned with what I want at this point in time. I’ll keep writing about them here, when I can.