Trying New Things

Somebody asked me if I had a new year’s resolution recently, and while I don’t do new year’s resolutions, I had actually resolved something.

I had resolved to try surfing. And I did, even in the freezing February Welsh sea. At almost the same time, I finally signed up for a theatre course. I now have about ten new friends and a hundred lines to memorize!

Trying new things is hard. As a developer, I have to constantly try new things, in order to stay up to speed with the world of software changing around us. And I love it. But trying out a new technology, framework or language is a comfortable new thing. I’ve done it all my life.

Trying out surfing or acting requires putting myself in an unfamiliar environment with unfamiliar people. As a possibly-on-the-spectrum introvert this is orders of magnitude harder. But the potential rewards are consequently orders of magnitude larger.

And there’s another thing. With the advent of LLMs that can do a large part of my job, I’ve had to re-evaluate the worth of my own skills. What was once a coveted skill can now be done in seconds by a distant machine. Of course I still value that skill (I think), but how much will future employers?

Getting out in the real world seems all the more important with the changes happening in the online world. I probably won’t make a living from surfing or acting, but who knows? It can’t hurt to have backups.