works of wanderlust

Tag: professional

  • lucid professionalism

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What made your job
    interesting in 2025?

    Some people may incorrectly tell you that technically I don’t have a job.

    They are wrong.

    I am not traditionally employed these days, true, but I do in a very real sense work for myself… which is a huge job and a lot of work.

    Living the dream… or maybe the nightmare. It really does depend on the perspective and the day of the week… and how much sleep I got last night.

    This state of existence is very much a privileged position emerging from a stable household income, a lack of consumer or property debt, and probably most importantly (I’m not even kidding) living a frugal lifestyle… at least relatively speaking. If anyone seriously asks looking for a serious answer I usually just tell them that we simply don’t buy anything we don’t actually need. We’re shitty consumers. We eat groceries not commercially prepared food.  We travel for adventure and experience, not for luxury or clout. We shop to replace, repair and maintain, not to own more stuff. 

    But I digress. 

    This state of privilege has allowed me to spin up a sole-employee, self-owned small corporation and do bit contract work as a means to keep my skills sharp and my days structured, while still leaving a tremendous amount of free time to do everything from write fiction, dabble in side projects, make art, and hang out with the dog.

    In the two and a half years since jumping ship on my last full-time gig, I have written extensively (mostly in private journals that will never be published) about the transition from salaryman middle-manager in a municipal government job to bumbling self-employed creative eking out a pittance of a living doing gigs. And as it turns out both roles are stressful, but in unique and different ways. The government work was the stress of deep accountability at multiple levels, accountability to a demanding public, to a corporate hierarchy, to direct reports, to technical fidelity, to process and security, to vendor contract fairness and a long list of other deep and abiding struggles that kept me awake into the wee hours of the night. The contractor work is the stress of building reputation, honest effort, uncertainty of next week, and the dark spectre of knowing that I am every role in my own company and no one is there to prop up any shortcomings if I forget to do something important.

    And yet in my lucid and rational moments, as much as I occasionally get that grass-is-greener mentality looking across the gap from present to past self, I am definitely happier and healthier where I am now. 

    The daily variety of living this type of professional existence is both humbling and exciting. 

    Yesterday I was reflecting on this same notion from the perspective of perspective itself: what part of this transition am I leaving behind, and in effect giving myself permission to pull down the metaphorical scaffolding of this professional notion I hold of myself as fixedly capable, instead looking to the broader variety of both gig and term jobs I could take on. Why? Because a year ago I was in a very different place as a guy (temporarily) working part-time day-by-day for a small company job that I had stepped into to fill the void of structure and a paycheque. And it turns out those are the two exactly wrong pieces that drive what makes this stage of my professional life interesting. Sure, I need to get paid… who the hell doesn’t? And sure, having something to do when I wake up each morning is important. But both of those things are somehow right now, in this privileged moment secondary to the adventure of dabbling and learning and contributing to interesting work efforts that I would never have encountered as a middle manager in government.

    It is a bit of a dream, after all. A bit surreal. A bit hard to explain clearly to anyone not experiencing it. And something that I know I will need to awake from …and then return to reality. But it sure as hell has been interesting, if nothing else.

  • cheap-ish therapy

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Who or what are you
    leaving behind in 2025?

    I was reading over old posts. I mean, half the reason I write this damn blog is that, as they say, writing is cheaper than therapy. That is to say… these words are mostly for me. It is a public journal of a sort, after all, with the key part of that being the notion of a journal.

    Four years ago (to the day) I wrote a post called “Another Life Reset” in which in my first year of writing these reflective posts I lamented on the state of my life as a bureaucratic pencil-pushing middle manager staring down the barrel of another decade or two in government IT work. It was the middle of a pandemic, after all, and my life had become something of a chaos train of salaryman red tape and taking on the stress and angst of a team full of web nerds who were spinning through a time of societal change and whathaveyou. I was deeply burnt out. Charred from the inside core and right out to the part where I was a bit of a zombie. It would take me another year or so, but I manifested that “life reset” and left that job for an open-ended pursuit. 

    It has not been a simple reset. 

    I have rolled through a small collection of random work, a laundry list of job interviews, re-training programs, and kick-starting my own small business.  And oddly enough, in the middle of so much risk and change and idealism it has been the spirit of the reset that has been the one thing pushed off to the side.

    I might even admit I’ve panicked a little bit.

    It is the thing to do, after all, when facing uncertainty. In the what-will-be two and a half years since I left my (un)comfortable stable income as a municipal employee I have found myself drifting back to the idea of that stability as a core tenant of my search rather than the reset that it was supposed to have articulated in my life. That is to say, I’ve been interviewing and pursuing familiar jobs that would literally reboot my currently reset life back into the same program.

    Not that it has worked.

    And I mean, look—the world is a crazy complex place right now.  It’s an employers market. I’m now less than a year away from fifty, and the whole notion of so-called career is as fuzzy as my chin on a Saturday morning. I kinda need to reset from the reset: to rethink the whole approach.

    I tell myself that over and over, but honestly it comes down to personal expectations and this lingering thought that I need a kind of self-granted permission to do something crazy.

    So that’s what I’m leaving behind. I’ve been thinking about it for a few months now, actually. My expectation for what this all looks like if and when it ever reboots needs to have a secondary reset. A purge of expectations. It is a leaving behind of mental frameworks for my professional self and looking ahead to a job that does more than “keep me busy” but rather gives back to the world in a meaningful way that counterbalances the whole drudgery of employment.

    I’ve set the pieces in place in 2025. Now it is time to pull down the scaffolding of my old concept of professional self and reveal what is possible. How’s that for some cheap therapy online, huh?

  • little green squares

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Describe your 2025 in tech or tools

    … to which I am going to answer with a picture of my Github contribution graph:

    If you know you know, but if you don’t know what this is, let me explain. Github is a code repository. It is like a cloud drive for computer code that keeps a hyper-detailed change record of writing software with the intended use cases being collaboration and tracking for software development. It is like a little library tool for writing and publishing and bookkeeping for code. Any time you are happy with your code, inasmuch as it runs and you want to snapshot something you built in case you break it or need to share it or just make a record of that work, you make a “contribution” to the repository. 

    I made 687 contributions to my repositories last year. 

    That little chart is a kind of heat-map of when I was writing code… or at least when I was saving something I wrote to a permanent record of development.

    In among those green boxes are:

    • a video game I’ve been developing
    • my personal social media feed app
    • two public wordpress plugins

    And what you don’t see there are:

    • a couple of private professional projects (…which probably account for another 300 or so contributions) 

    All in all, I would guess I submitted to Github repositories (albeit my own) about a thousand times in 2025… which is to say I wrote a heckuva lot of code in 2025, kind of equally split between Rust and PHP.

    That’s not trivial. 

    I wish I could tell you that I wrote a thousand stories in 2025 or drew a thousand sketches in 2025. I cannot.

    I can tell you that I sat down at a keyboard and wrote out tens of thousands of lines of intricate computer code, some for myself and some for professional work, that turned into functioning software. I can tell you that my 2025 was a year of making, and that I am coming out of this year in a state of having made interesting and useful things in computer code that a year ago were either ideas or maybe not even that much.

    I just spent nearly three weeks in Japan and made over a hundred posts to my own micro-feed app, a lite-cms that I have been writing for three years and honing for the last few months.

    I have a game that is still deep in development but it runs on my SteamDeck and I have logged a few dozens of hours play-testing it and it is not terrible.

    I spent multiple weeks spread over five months writing code for professional clients under the flag of my new corporation and that code has now all been deployed and (I am assuming) helping those clients run websites and business operations.

    That has been my 2025 in technology: highly coded, and contributed, and there is a neat little graph that marks it all in a record of progress right there as a series of little green squares.

  • study’s end

    Twenty four hours from when I started penning these words will mark the start of the final module in a bit of professional upgrading I’ve been working on. That’s to say, class starts this time tomorrow and then after this final weekend of lectures—and one more big assignment to submit—I’ll be complete.

    On a weird side note, one of the reasons I decided to take the course was to spend a small bit of inheritance left to me by my grandmother, and to spend it on something both experiential and useful: education. The last class of the last modules is on Sunday, two days from now, which would have been her one hundred and fourth birthday. Unplanned. Coincidence.

    I spent over a decade working for the local municipal government, and that was after a previous decade spent hopping around between project and program coordination and management roles.

    I was trained for none of it.

    I had done a pair of degrees, one in science and one in education, and both pursued out of some vapid obligation to a sense that I was “supposed” to do something both useful and that would pay well. I hated lab work. And then I emerged from my education degree in a hiring freeze.  Instead I landed at a sweet job in the not-for-profit sector out on the west coast. 

    Long story short, I never went back to any job that used either of those degrees directly, but instead I bopped around using all those critical analysis sciency and stand up and educate others skills to become an ad hoc project manager, systems designer, and eventually a straight up middle manager guy.

    …with a science degree.

    After nearly a year and a half of a career transition, having done some personal projects, part time work, and personal reflection, I figured my next obvious step was to put some credentials behind all that experience I had gathered on my meandering journey through the work world. Sure, I could do it. Sure, I had a seventeen page resume giving examples. But there is just something about those educational bonafides that throws a brick through the glass walls of future employment prospects. So I’ve been working on a business certification: a piece of paper from a high class university that says, hey, Brad studied this stuff formally, listened to experts, wrote words about it, handed in assignments, and got adjudicated on his effectiveness in these things.

    And in a week or two, when that final grade appears on my transcript and they tell me I’ve completed all the pieces, I will be able to add to my resume an extra line that says “Business Analysis Certified, University of Alberta, 2025.”

    Thanks Grandma.