Log

2640F

It’s been almost 6 months since I started in my current job and about a year and a half since I’ve returned to full time employment. On paper I’m in a good spot financially, carreer-wise and in work conditions. Nevertheless I’m stressed and unhappy most of the time. Today I want to explore why that is and maybe what I can do about it.

I have a pretty typical “high-functioning ADHD” work history. I started out in freelance photography, moving on to a couple of failed businesses with friends and finally freelance web development in my early twenties. My first job as an employee lasted five years, moving from customer support to product management at an SaaS company. I was contemplating quitting for close to a year when I was let go - burnout and a company restructuring left my position easily removed. I spent half a year blissfully coasting on my severance before joining a friend’s company running marketing and most of the software-related initiatives. Once that company started circling the drain I moved back to project management at a software agency, spending 8 months going from fired up to burned out and leaving. An unexpected windfall and savings allowed me to spend the next two years free. I dug deep into photography, completed photojournalism school and started freelancing in web development again. As resources started to run dry I started contracting as brodacast technician at a sports TV channel. After about half a year I took a full time IT admin job, then hopped to a BA role once my employer started sliding towards bancrupcy (again). The BA role was miserable from the start so I jumped ship once more, landing at my current employer leading their newly established software team.

Almost all of my full time roles started with excitement and high commitment then ended in fast and total burnout. Freelancing periods felt a lot better, but usually ended when my challenges with bringing in new business caught up with me, leaving my finances untenable. The exception is the TV gig, which wasn’t really freelance, limiting my income simply by the amount of work the station had available (plus the strain of working mostly nights and weekends didn’t help).

So let’s look at the patterns in all this.

Software jobs leave me struggling with the requirements of employment - set working hours, office presence, having to prioritize the formal framework over the substance of what I’m producing. They usually don’t provide much emotional fulfillment either, with the straightforward business mostly being in boring background services for giant corporate clients.

I do genuinely enjoy software however, and even while in dayjobs in the field I often try to find more exciting software projects to do on the side.

Freelancing lets me work with, rather than against my natural tendencies and allows me freedom to find excitement in how I solve a particular client problem. Being responsible for bringing in business however is immensely stressful for me. I’m generally uncomfortable with and unmotivated by all the business parts of running a business, so the burnout stems from having to force myself to do the things that bring in income, while not being very good at them either. This internal conflict tends to also taint the substance of what I do; after my first major period of freelance photography ended, I didn’t touch a camera for years.

The conclusion: I need the freedom of creativity and flexible working conditions of freelancing, but I also need the stable income and lack of business responsibilities of employment.

My current job is almost perfect on paper. I have flexible work hours, work mostly from home, I have some control over my and my teams workflows and approaches, I have new projects regularly to keep up excitement and a solid salary to allow me to not worry about finances day-to-day. So why am I not happy?

Even though in theory I have all this freedom and control, I still feel like I need to fulfill all the explicit and unspoken expectations of company politics, buorocracy and productivity ideals. Logging work time, being available any time my boss randomly schedules a call, jumping on every new task as if it’s life or death to complete - I feel my job’s in jeopardy if I’m not a good, obedient worker bee.

Objectively however I have the framework to treat this job as a freelance/consulting role without the sales and the uncertainty. I have more freedom and authority to shape things than in any previous role I’ve had. When I need to commit to a deadline, I can work following my natural rythm, working intensly in a couple days’s sprint. Just because everyone else around me works at a steady pace from start to deadline doesn’t force me to do the same. I can ignore a phone call and call back when I’m ready to, I can block out my calendar to prevent unexpected urgent meetings, I can work from cafes mixing photography and work during the day, I can take a day off when I’m low on energy without needing anyone’s permission. Like a freelancer, I only need to make sure I produce good work by the deadline. How I get there is, in practice, fully up to me.

So for my current situation this might be the way out of stress and burnout: realizing and keeping in mind the fact that I need to meet explicit expectations but not imagined ones. I can think of myself as a free agent, contracted to produce work rather than an employee required to act busy for the benefit of the boss.

A different aspect of what I am drawn to do is the content of the work. I feel strongly that some things are valuable for me and others aren’t. In art as well as technology I suffer from a lack of this value and have a stubborn urge to flip the table and go do something valuable, whatever may come.

But what do I mean when I feel something is valuable or not? What defines the things I feel I want to spend my life doing?
I have some thoughts on that:

• inherent value - things with a cultural, artistic value in themselves, not dependent on the economic or instrumental benefits they provide
• challenge - work within my abilities but requiring me to stretch, to come up with creative new solutions, not just iterating on already established solutions
• self-directed - work triggered by my own ideas or allowing total freedom in the approach or solution
• creative - projects that have me create something new and something of tangible substance in the real world and for real people
• opinionated - not aimed at appealing to everyone, not following the generally accepted approaches, but rather having a strong sense or idea of how something can be done or presented, a message or an approach that’s my own
• weird - things that are unusual, quirky, niche or fun, in content, goal or execution

Putting all this together I’m not sure where I land. The dream has always been to be in business for myself, fueled by excitement and making interesting, human scale things. I’ve spent over a decade returning to this dream again and again. It takes a different shape every time - an indie software studio, a SaaS business, photojournalism, being a full time artist, quirky IT services for cool organizations, the list is endless. Every iteration deadends however when I realize the idea needs more than motivation and excitement and creativity, it needs a business model and a source of new clients. That’s usually where I dejectedly close the notebook and relegate myself to trying to optimise the misery out of my current job for a few more months.

2624S

Today I’m thinking about the fact that I have mixed up “work-like tech” activities with “hobby tech” activities. The distinction isn’t about whether I do something as part of my job or not. Work-like things feel like work, like they have a specific deliverable, like I have a deadline. They can feel like I’m required to do them, to finish them. Hobby things on the other hand feel like play, they engage me directly, not via their goal.

With my changes in work and turmoils in personal life, I haven’t really had time for proper hobby tech things. I’ve had some ideas, sure, but I mostly ended up speccing them and having them built (badly) by AI tools, prompting and testing from my phone, in fragmented moments.

I’ve long wanted to build out a web framework or toolkit for myself that felt fun, that felt like play. It’s been a while since I worked with code properly, directly, so this would need proper, dedicated time. I can’t start this in 15 minute increments, I need to allocate a few hours regularly to refresh my skills and learn new ones.

I have a smallweb instance running on a server, that is a great basis for this kind of dev-play. I’ve set it up precisely with this goal in mind, but then life happened and it’s mostly been used for quick personal tooling projects for my dayjob.

Another aspect is the right personal computer that can feel fun. I mostly do this kind of stuff now on a Linux box, over ssh, so what I mostly need is a device with a good keyboard and decent battery life.
Of course I still have an 11" MacBook Air which would be great for this, except that the OS just gobbles up power, and the aftermarket battery I have in it is good for maybe an hour or so. I’d prefer to stick to an Apple device to retain muscle memory for the keyboard layout, so I can either figure out how to make the OS on the Air more battery friendly, or I can invest in a newer device, maybe a 12" MacBook or an M1 Air.

One more piece of the puzzle is a good way to have documentation in a terminal based environment. Regardless of the client device I use, I’d prefer to keep everything focused on the Linux box, so I’ll need some way to have API and framework and lanugage docs in text files or some similar text-based environment, rather than via the browser.
A simple solution would be to just pull the repos for the docs of each project, since most will have either a docs repo or docs as part of the project repo. A good dedicated solution is dedoc, a terminal based browser for DevDocs.
An alternate approach is using a text-based browser, although I haven’t yet found one that works reliably across modern webpages. elinks might be a good candidate I’m going to try.

2612F

I’m deep in a rabbit hole about cameras. This is a recurring fixation, that bubbles up when I’m dissatisfied or feel boxed in. Photography is a keystone of my sense of balance and satisfaction, so when life gets a bit difficult, I try to make myself feel better with taking more pictures.

Thinking that new gear will solve my dissatisfaction is not unique to me of course. It’s such a trope that it’s almost boring to bring up the fallacy of this assumption. Good pictures happen when you’re in balance and can fully focus on what you’re photographing. Stress, distraction destroy focus and pictures come out forced, sloppy. Equipment does affect mood however. There are inspiring and uninspiring cameras, and feeling good about holding your tools can help tune in to the work you’re doing.

So I am trying to figure out what camera I will get myself once I have the money to do it. This makes it even more futile, since I’m prepondering a decision I can’t yet make. Regardless, I’m thinking about it all the time.

I have a DSLR kit I’m happy with, for times I am fully in photographer mode. I also have a Ricoh GR, a pocket-sized camera perfect for off-the-cuff shooting when I’m doing something else primarily. But there is a hole between the two cameras, something in between that’s missing.

This “middle camera” needs to be small. Not jeans pocket small, but small enough that I can carry it everywhere and it doesn’t feel too serious, too professional when I point it at someone. I shoot a lot of street photography, and I’m most comfortable when I can shoot unnoticed or at least easily ignored. This also points to a small and quiet camera. While the GR fits this perfectly, it doesn’t feel controlled enough to shoot. I’m used to more decisive controls and a viewfinder. It’s also lacking in focusing speed and accuracy, especially at dusk and other dimly lit situations.

I imagine a one camera - one lens kit for this in-between kit, so focal length is also a question. I go back and forth between 28mm and 35mm, which are fairly close, but feel quite different to compose with. I do have the GR at 28mm however, so it feels a bit redundant to get another kit in the same field of view. Especially, because it tends to be a little too wide for me in the types of everyday shooting situations I would use the new kit in.

As you can see, I’ve made this question pretty complicated for myself.

I have a shortlist of cameras I’m considering: a Canon RP, a FujiFilm X-T or X-E series, or (if I happen to win the lottery) a Leica Q. The simplest solution would be the Fuji X100V, but even that is quite a bit outside my budget for something that’s not strictly a necessary purchase.

The RP would be ideal for tones and colors, it’s almost identical to my DSLR (a 5D mark III), which I love for its organic, balanced look. The best lens for that however (both in size and price) would be a 28mm, which would require more engagement with my subjects than I’m looking for. A native 35mm exists, but it’s a bit too large for the casual, secondary role I wand the new camera to play.

The Fujis aren’t the best on price, an older body and lens would cost me about the same (or more) as the RP, which has the colors and tonality I like more than Fuji’s.

Another option I’ve not yet considered seriously is a newer GR, with better low light capabilities, equipped with a grip and a coldshoe viewfinder to help me frame in a more natural way. This is also not the best option however, it wouldn’t feel as substantial and “second nature” as the other options.

The most frustrating aspect of all this is that I currently don’t have the funds to splurge on a third camera. In the past I’ve always found a way to make gear purchases work, but this time my only real option would be to sell my existing kit and go all-in on the new one. The smart answer of course is to wait and save up a bit, but that’s pretty difficult for me. Patience is not something I’m good at.

Well, anyways.