basics

basics

I’m in a new position at work. Not extremely new, per se; what I’m doing hasn’t materially changed too much, but the division itself has, and therefore so have expectations. I’ve been forced to master a great many things I was able to avoid before, and it’s always a deeply discomfiting, uncomfortable experience: one feels dumb all the damn time. I’ve come to realize a long time ago that discomfort is a good sign, more often than not, at least when it came to work: it is the growing pains of growth. Whether it’s growth in the direction I want to grow in is a completely separate matter; it still is growth, though. I have a bunch of succulents by the windows growing at extremely odd angles; you can tell why they grew that way, but was it something they intended? Or wanted? Or just had no choice to, given their environment and placement on the window sill?

Or more likely than not, am I just projecting here?

I signed up for math academy because nowadays, in the rush of having to learn new technical frameworks, new languages, all these abstractions of an abstraction of an abstraction feels a bit dull. Struggling with a yaml file (how in god’s name do I know the yaml file will run correctly short of running it in prod and watching it fail?) doesn’t really feel like mastery and I feel all my basics slipping away with every new thing I have to master.