With this first post, my inclination is to try and answer the question of why I’m starting one in the first place. In fact, why am I even creating a new website when I already had an old one that was perfectly functional? The answer lies in my current situation.

At the time of writing, I’m 23 and graduated from college not seven months ago. I went to the University of Chicago, and studied computer science, earning a Bachelor of Arts. In retrospect, it might’ve not been the keenest idea on my part to have chosen to study CS, but it’s all said and done now and I’ve gotta look into the future. I met my girlfriend in my third year at the University, but it turned out that she was from Hong Kong, and was on an exchange year to Chicago from UCL in London. I had thought this was very interesting, and possibly that the national selection was altogether not for me - three months after graduation I moved to London. Now at the beginning I was living temporarily with her, but we had agreed beforehand that we were going to live separately at first just to see how it went.

That pretty much sums up where I’m at now - I’m living in London by myself more or less and I work at a cafe. It’s a nice and busy one in the near east London area and my co-workers are all very pleasant, so I enjoy myself at work, sure, but I’ve been trying for a higher-paying job for the past couple of months and so far unsuccessfully. Part of the reason I haven’t found a place yet is due to my lack of motivation some may call it for the career I would be headed into as a software engineer or something similar. I just don’t seem to have a fighting spirit when it comes to working at a tech place as a coder. What drives me to the application pages is a combination of monetary aspirations and social weight - you just can’t seem to tell people without a sense of guilt and shame that you work in a cafe when you’ve gone through such and such university studying a such and such topic.

There is some value in what I took from studying, and that’s my confidence to pick up a textbook and read it start to finish. I enjoy learning about the theoretical things all too much and maybe more than what’s good for me, but it’s a strength that I want to cherish and nurture. There’s a strong emphasis to just sit down and code something when you really want to learn the computer or a system or an architecture well, but that’s been a weak point of mine. I hesitate when it comes to setting my finger down on the keyboard when I have my eyes on a text editor with a main() staring down at me. A regular at the cafe who I’ve grown to know quite well has advised me to stay away from Rust, which I have a strong interest in just for it’s bare-metal raw power in the right hands, but I think it’s exactly what I needed to hear because where I’m at right now certainly doesn’t boast any such hands.

I do have quite a few interests and aspirations, but that isn’t enough to be successful. What I lack is an experience in application, and a joy in creation.