I'm not sure how long my hiatus will be, but I've got a bunch of creative projects that I'd love to finish. I'm making this list to remind myself of goals and keep myself accountable.
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Writing and art. I play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons, both as a player and as a DM. It's a fantastic way to hang out with old friends across the country. It's also an intensely creative and collaborative exercise, just like software engineering -- although in this case you're collectively improvising a story together. A couple of months ago I signed up for a self-guided writing course on writing a first D&D adventure, and so I'll finally have time to work on this. I also see this as an excuse to draw and include my own illustrations; I've never published my amateur art in any real product.
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Music. I have a long history of writing music for theater, but during the pandemic that world shut down and I discovered all sorts of electronic composition. I built racks of modular synthesizers and had a blast, but in the end, I realized I was spending all my time designing synthesizers rather than writing musical pieces. So I sold it all and kept only special "input controllers" that could be played like real instruments, with real human expression: for example, my Moog theramin and my Roli Seaboard fretless piano. I also switched from decades of using Logic Pro to using Ableton Live, which was much more suited for electronic experimentation. I even picked up a Push Controller, which allows me to build loops and perform melodies sitting on my couch, then finish the song later on the computer with Ableton. My computer is now filled with dozens of half-written tunes, so my goal is to actually finish some and put out an album... probably a homemade blend of EDM, Lo-Fi, and Funk.
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Japanese. I have a long love of linguistics, having studied Spanish, Latin, and German when I was young. But I've always been curious about what it would feel like to learn a really different lanuage -- something non-Indo-European, with a syntax / grammar / structure that is utterly novel to me. Does it cause your brain to operate in a different way? So, being cooped up during the pandemic, I figured it was time for some self-study. I considered Chinese, Japanese and Korean; I ended up choosing Japanese because it felt like I was already immersed in its culture. I'm surrounded by sushi restaurants; my kids talk about anime all the time; even my art supplies are Japanese.
And so I started self-teaching from Genki, the poplular 1st-year university textbook. I found a study partner online, and we started video-chatting once a week to check homework assignments together, slowly progressing through the chapters. (We're now halfway into the second textbook!) Because textbooks -- sans classroom and teacher -- don't really teach the skills of listening and speaking very well, I signed up for the HelloTalk social media app and have been (awkwardly) chatting with real Japanese people in group voice-rooms. It sounds scary until you realize that they're just as terrible (and nervous) as they try to practice English with you!
After two years of this, my conclusions are: (1) wow, it is a *really different language and incredibly challenging (as expected), and (2) I should really try to visit Japan for the first time. I think it will be thrilling if I'm able to make bare-bones conversation as a tourist.
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Machine Learning. Programmers don't just write code anymore; there's an entire altnerate workflow for solving a problem with machine learning. Last summer I began working through some simple tutorials on how to analyze data sets in Colab and train basic models using Tensorflow. Even if I'm not planning to go back to full-time programming, I still need to have basic literacy in this ML workflow. I don't believe traditional coding will ever go away, but rather that 'ML engineering' will become a complementary skillset that sits side-by-side with traditional programming. Some problems require deterministic solutions, some require fuzzy ones. They are both valid modes of solving engineering problems. And so my goal is to build and launch at least some sort of ML project.
Are you interested in these hobbies as well? If you have thoughts, feel free to reach out. :-)
Photo of my creative writing environment, using a Freewrite typewriter. とてもここちよい！
published January 15, 2024