JASCO

What do I want to be?

Published: Wed, 27 Nov 2024 01:41:44 -0800

I hung out with some fellow CompSci majors after class

It was kinda nice talking with people who were interested in programming, but it kinda felt like a competition on who knew more. One of the guys was really knowledgable and very involved in the clubs, which he had me join. At one point he asked me if I was interested in AI, no not really, then data science, no not really either. Then he asked me what I did like, and I said configuring servers and self hosting. But the question has had me thinking, what do I actually want to do with this degree when I get it?

I would be perfectly content having a mid-level job, whether it be in IT or development, not truly invested in what I'm working on, clocking out and then doing things outside of work that I enjoy. I feel like this is a reasonable expectation. I've never been the type to do things just to have a shiny resume. I'm not wanting to climb the corporate ladder, nor put my blood, sweat, and tears into a start-up. If it's something I find half-interesting, all the better, but I just want a life outside the office.

The things I actually enjoy writing are little utilities, applications that the user works with directly, or that makes their life easier by working in the background. Although the only user I've ever had is myself, which makes it easy. I want to make Linux apps. I want to write free software. I don't want to have to put on a collared shirt if I don't feel like it. I don't want to be sitting through meetings, staring at the clock, begging for the hour to be over. I don't want to be a slave to the machine.

So I feel conflicted, do I somehow attempt to make writing the little programs into a profession to live a fulfilling career, or do I take the safe and easy path and put up with the mundanity of an office job in order to have more of a disposable income which can be put towards other things I enjoy.

This conflict caused me to work on an old half-finished project: Xax. It's a wrapper for the xbps package manager inspired by Yay on Arch. There's no aur or anything like that, just makes searching for and installing packages a little faster. I wrote the bulk of it a couple years ago, and it's certainly far from my best work, but it does function. I've been using it for a couple years now and figured I should finally publish it. I refactored it a bit and split it up out of the one larger c++ file it originally was.

Even though it ain't much, I enjoy doing this more than anything

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