Back in November, I quit my first job. It had been a long time coming, as I had been unsatisfied with my pay and the work I was doing (both in terms of rhythm and the tasks themselves). I’m lucky enough to be in the financial position where it wasn’t completely crazy to leave my job in the middle of a pandemic, and that there seems to be an endless need for software developers so finding another job didn’t seem very difficult.
At the time, I decided that December was going to be a more relaxed month. I hoped that it would serve as a way to reset myself and perhaps revert some of the changes I had seen develop in myself at the time. I was half successful: some of the changes were brought by my increase in weight and won’t go away anytime soon; others feel like something within me broke and I haven’t figured out how to fix.
Regardless, the march of time never stops. While I’m in a better place than when I took this decision, it was clear it was time to find another job. Not just because of financial reasons, but also because I find it difficult to set goals on my own and commit to them once the new project energy has worn off.
That said, one of the challenges I set for this year was to review what I’ve been doing often. There are things I want to accomplish, such as investing time in photography or actually riding my bicycle, and I’d like to direct my life towards those goals without the pressure of a hard schedule. The objective would be to review often, perhaps weekly, with the intent of celebrating and bringing to the forefront whatever steps I take towards these goals.
As such, and hopefully one of many:
Last week, I finally got around editing some of the photos in my backlog. While there are still more to select and go through, it was nice to sort through a few of them. Plus, that means I have more photos ready to be shared! And, on that vein, I have been posting photos to Instagram when I feel like it.
I also made some changes to my CV. I had received some feedback that it was rather sparse and that it should better describe the work I actually performed, so I went ahead and was more explicit about what I did. It also isn’t as relevant anymore as I have a new job already (contract signature pending), but it’s already done for when I have to look again, so no loss.
Finally, I looked into setting up my own instance of Pixelfed. It wasn’t successful for a variety of reason, such as my own inexperience with PHP and its ecosystem, and also because I decided that the Raspberry Pi I bought would have Raspbian instead of Debian (or Ubuntu), but I gave it a fair shot. Regardless, the more I think about it the less I think it would have been a good fit for me: it still works under the Instagram model, so it isn’t particularly useful for a gallery; and having to manage it myself is ever less appealing. That said, I do still want to update my pixelfed.social account to have the same content as my Instagram, as I’d love to support fediverse software.
Ardyvee 