As we stare down the barrel of a potential third year of pandemic living, and I look ahead to turning thirty (both of which will happen within days of each other), I wanted to pause and take stock of where I am. After all, how can you expect to get where you are going if you don’t know where you are? I want to use this post to orient myself, and to give myself a concrete point-in-time to look back at from some far-flung future.
I came into 2021 on a pretty high note. I closed out 2020 as my best year I had ever had professionally, and my now-wife and I adopted a big goofy dog named Lincoln. Actually, getting Lincoln was a pretty big deal. I didn’t feel like I had a dog growing up (my folks adopted one when I was in my late teens, and I moved out when I was 20, so I didn’t spend much time with it. And it never liked me). My best friend had a dog, though. I think she was a german shepherd mix, and she was the sweetest. She was the reason that, when I relented to my wife’s insistence to get a dog, I said I wanted a big one.
Ergo, Lincoln: the ~100 lbs mastiff mix that now bogarts all the comfy furniture. Beyond territorial napping, he helped me by grounding my schedule with regular walks and meals, and forced me to get out of the house and exercise. Before we got Lincoln, I was going days without going outside, often spending the majority of my time in two spots: in front of my computer for work/games, or in bed. I definitely feel healthier now that I have this dog to take care of. Also, he’s heckin’ cute.
Vaccines.
I think I speak for the majority of folks that discussions around vaccines dominated the spring of ‘21: how fast can we get them, who gets them first, who gets them at all, is one better than the other, etc. My wife and I jumped on them pretty much as soon as they were available to our age group. Which was great, except for one thing: I fainted.
Apparently it’s somewhat common (specifically among young men) to experience “White Coat Syndrome” - basically, medical situations make me nervous. So much so that I fainted while receiving my first dose. I feel bad, because to me it felt like an involuntary nap. But it scared the hell out of the nurse administering the vaccine and my wife, who was there with me in the room. This is something I need to work on (an aside - I didn’t faint during the second one. But I prepared well for it: ate a bunch of salty food and wore compression socks to keep my blood pressure up, on the advice of the nurse who saw me faint).
Spring was also when I was, ah, forcefully encouraged to start publishing my writing online. Which I’m overwhelmingly grateful for. I had this notion that I would spin up a personal site, engineer a full blogging solution for myself (after all, I am a web developer), written all in a new framework before I started posting anything I had written.
Ya, right.
I have still done none of the projects I had originally planned to do before I started publishing my writing. I’m glad I picked this solution off the shelf and just started putting words on the internet. And while I still don’t know where I want to take this writing hobby, I at least know why I’m writing. It also gave me the confidence to write two articles for my company on Medium, which have accrued about a thousand combined views (links for the curious: one on GraphQL generally and one on DataLoaders).
Summer I hit a professional milestone I’m overjoyed about: my company promoted me to the title of Senior Developer.
In general, I’m not a “titles” kind of person. Unless there’s some abstract third party or accreditation entity that tries to create some parity, titles end up solely being meaningful internally. Like, anyone who starts their own business is a CEO. But there’s a difference between managing You Inc. versus Amazon.
So, taken with a grain of salt, I am happy to be acknowledged as a Senior Developer by a serious engineering organization. There does seem to be a trend of title-inflation in software development at large, so I’m not putting too much stock in it. Still. As much as I say I don’t care about titles, and I have no idea how most other folks perceive titles, it’s nice to feel like I’ve earned a badge of merit that says: “Hey, listen to this guy. He knows some things”.
It also throws into focus a more serious problem I now have: the problem of no problems.
I was striving for that title essentially since I started pursuing development at age 18, whether I knew it at the time or not. I’ve never been one for half-measures. In some ways, Senior Developer is the “top end” of some engineering career ladders. Some organizations have more granularity than that (I think I’ve seen posts about Level 6 Software Development Engineers? Better come with a cool hat). Other organizations have the next rung up labelled “Engineering Manager”.
Which raises an interesting question: do I want to get into leadership professionally?
It has become widely acknowledged that being a developer and managing developers are independent skill-sets. Meaning a transition into management could feel like starting from scratch. Do I want to be a developer for my whole life? Do I want to throw out the last 10+ years of coding ability and make the leap into managing people? Would I be any good at? Would the people who reported to me hate the job I was doing? Could I fire somebody??
Thankfully, I don’t have to answer these questions today. The company I work for offers a technical leadership track, which I think is my next step. I still love coding and don’t want to lose that part of my day-to-day any time soon.
I’ll start with the less significant highlight of Fall ‘21 first: I ran a game of Dungeons and Dragons as the Dungeon Master for the first time.
I’ve played D&D bi-weekly for the last four-ish years with the same group, and in the fall we were approaching the end of our adventure through the Curse of Strahd campaign. To give our permanent DM a break and to stretch my creative muscles, I asked the group if they would be comfortable with me running the next leg of the adventure.
They said yes.
I’ve done some hobbyist world-building over the years (in fact, this blog showcases some of the fruits of that world-building), and wanted to see if I could weave any of those ideas into an interesting D&D narrative. While it was harder than I expected (and in ways I did not expect), I think I pulled off a pretty decent adventure centred around the villainous Father Bertrand and the mysterious Ostium Silex.
Going into it, running combat was what worried me. The players were getting to be pretty high level, and I worried I would create underwhelming encounters (or, on the other end of the spectrum, kill them). I think the combat went well, ending in a climactic showdown between the heroes, devils, and avatars of a giant snake deity threatening to destroy a major city.
Where I struggled was player motivation and direction. There’s a dirty word in the D&D DMing community, and that word is “railroading”. Railroading is when you force your players to do precisely what you have planned with no player input. To quote a wise DM: “at that point, why even have players?”
I don’t want to force them to do anything, but I also can’t plan for every eventuality. The eternal DM conundrum. In the end, I think we were able to limp our way over the finish line of the narrative. The biggest lesson I took away from this experience is to pay closer attention to my players’ archetypes. If they engage with people, make the narrative about the people. If they engage with the world, make the narrative about the world.
And if they engage with the combat, make the narrative about the combat.
I didn’t do this, and it wound up feeling (to me) like I had to force confrontations for the sake of providing more combat for the players. This isn’t a bad thing per se. Combat is a big part of D&D. What I’ve learned is to not try and run Hamlet for a group that wants to play WWE.
Then there’s the big one. The highlight of my year. Maybe the highlight of my life:
I got married.
I don’t think I have much to say about my wedding in this format. To me, there are a million stories and moments associated with the wedding that I will keep with me for my whole life. But they feel personal, and private.
What I will say is: in late October, as the leaves changed to a brilliant array of reds and oranges and browns, on the edge of a stormy lake, two gingers said “I do” in front of a handful of close friends and family. We ate, drank, danced, and shared a singular moment in the history of all our lives.
That one, single day shines out like a beacon in otherwise dark times.
And they lived happily ever after.