Welcome

Ex boredom

After arriving in NZ on a Working Holiday Visa, I found it hard to be self-disciplined on those days when my partner worked while I waited for a recruiter to send me a job offer. Getting job offers proved to be more difficult than I expected. There are lots of well-paid positions, but they all require the right to work. The market right now seems disinterested in candidates without the right to work, and contract jobs are few and very competitive.

After several weeks of feeling a bit aimless, I **realized** that sabbatical can be an opportunity for growth outside of a job. With lots of time on my hands and years of coming up with projects that never materialized, I decided to turn my job into a hobby. This website is the beginning of what I hope to be a portfolio of cool projects nobody would pay me to do.

The plan is to publish what I've been up to regularly. Goal: 1 week, 1 project.

Being a generalist

At my job, we hire grads with little experience **to start them off** as generalists. They are generalists in the sense that everyone is expected to pick up any stack to deliver a project. The type of projects we do follow normal distribution. With the peak being web apps hosted on the cloud, many people end up only doing full-stack web development.

The logical progression of becoming a generalist is to expand to cover several standard deviations of programming projects. I have been lucky enough to be able to **diversify** my experience in the six years I've been at my job, but it has become increasingly difficult to come by anything that would push me further. That's when one starts to specialize. When you specialize and gain seniority, you **realize** that suddenly the diversity of projects you can work on shrinks. You become really good at a subset of things and when a new opportunity comes up, you are required to do what you excel at. And here we are: a generalist who only works on data engineering projects.

Why do lots of different things

My top reasons to do and learn new things are:

• Freedom
• Fun
• Self-discovery

We value freedom. To me, being able to build things is freedom. Computer Science graduates often end up being successful in seemingly unrelated careers, which can no doubt be attributed to the world becoming increasingly technology-driven. Musicians nowadays often program whole music tracks. Much art is produced using software that can be programmed by the user. Automation makes previously tedious tasks a breeze. The list goes on. By learning new things, our toolkit grows, allowing us to solve problems in new ways with less anxiety.

Not everything we do in life serves some greater purpose. Listening to music, watching a TV show, or playing a game are arguably not the most productive or fulfilling activities, but most of us make time to do at least some of them because they are enjoyable to us. Finding enjoyment in everyday life is important. I often miss the feeling I had when being in a flow working on some especially interesting project. I feel that way less and less at work, but when I do, it's usually because I have just started to work on a new project. Learning new things and quickly progressing is fulfilling and enjoyable. That's perhaps why we often abandon bigger personal projects.

By doing lots of different things, one learns to see patterns, and the world becomes more conceptually connected. Being able to see patterns is one way of understanding the concept of intelligence. New experiences help our brains build connections, and we begin recognizing patterns. In turn, this allows us to understand ourselves better in relation to the world around us.

Ideas

Everyone has at a point experienced a creative block. That's why it's good to have a backlog of ideas to lean on when inspiration doesn't strike.

Here are mine, together with categories and difficulty ratings:

Looking at these, I think I might have gone too ambitious, but the point is volume over polish. Perhaps if I love any of the projects enough, I will spend more time on them.