Posted on 2026-01-16
This post was lovingly hand-typed, by real human hands on a real keyboard. No AI was used anywhere here, and I hope my clunky writing style is enough to dissuade anyone from ever assuming anything else.
2026 has just started, and next week I will quit my job. So far I am the only person to ever quit and rejoin my company, and soon I will be the only person to quit twice. I’m at the beginning of a huge change, and this feels like a great time to reflect on myself, on my career, and on the role of technology in the life of myself and those around me. This year I resolve to be in touch with my creative side, and embrace the life I quietly imagine in my dreams.
Technology has always fascinated me. I was fortunate to have computers around the house growing up, and some of my earliest memories were sitting on my dad’s lap watching him play classic games - Duke Nukem 3D, Quake 2, Red Alert, Age of Empires (probably inappropriate for a 3-year-old, but great memories nonetheless). I saw computers as an amplifier of my power, a tool that I could use to experience things I could not otherwise experience, and to create things I could not otherwise create. I wanted to understand how they worked, and how I could use them as a creative tool.
I started programming at around age 8 or 9, with Python. It was hard, so I gave up. I was doing some programming in Game Maker around then too, but that was more scripting. In hindsight Game Maker (and the associated Game Maker Language, aka GML) was a great way to become familiar with concepts like variables, and C-family keywords (the language is inspired by Java), without having to consider the big-picture plumbing of a whole program. Data flow was simple, in that it was completely out of my hands. Over time I would learn HTML, some Javascript, bits of Java and Python. In highschool I wrote small Java games, but when I was reaching an age where I could understand enough to write significant programs, my attention and heart were caught up in the dream of being a musician.
I came back to programming, via dropping out of a classical music degree, in 2016. I completed a Bachelor of Computer Science and, despite issues with courses run by disengaged lecturers who really just wanted to be doing their research, I was learning in my degree. Mostly I was teaching myself - learning to learn, and learning how much there was to learn in the world of technology. I started using Linux for everything, after experimenting in VMs. I wrote all of my code in vim (and continue to do so almost exclusively to this day, although often in nvim now). It was exciting, I felt like a craftsman. Every algorithm, paradigm, or concept, built
up my toolbox of ideas. I learned to decompose a problem, dissecting it into inputs and outputs, and explored how to plumb between them. I learned some Haskell for fun, while already working and studying.
I entered the workforce on interesting terms. The first 6 months of my internship in the public service was spent on a doomed project, and everything I contributed to it was binned in short order. I moved on to an IAM-related project, on a team of 4 salvaging the pieces of a mostly failed experiment after it was handed back from contractors. As an intern, I had a surprisingly large role in helping to define what our goals were, and made some big contributions to our processes and deployments. When I joined, we had no way of knowing what rules/policies were running in production, so I helped to establish a deployment pipeline. I stayed on after my internship, and continued to get payed intern rates. With how remuneration in the public service worked, I realized that they would never be able to afford to keep me.
I moved on to banking, through more mismanaged projects, and eventually into logistics tech. I got a reputation for being good at what I did, I was productive wherever I went. The praise was always nice. Life caught up to me in lots of ways in 2023, between bad health and the collapse of a relationship, and I quit my job to explore other things. I taught in schools, I learned Rust in the mornings while attempting to build a programming language compiler, and I livestreamed coding to Twitch.tv. Even when not working in tech, my love of technology shone through. At the start of 2025 I rejoined my old job, and picked up where I left off. As the year wore on I felt things changing in myself. I made new friends, found new communities, and slowly started questioning my place in the world and the future of technology.
The current AI hype is insane. I don’t understand how we got to where we are, with LLMs threatening to eat the world. They are flashy technology, they are interesting, and they are definitely good at doing some very specific things, but I cannot understand the way that they are being sold. I see a bleak future down this road: LLMs become embedded in the hearts of many businesses, at the expense of real human jobs. Once they are indispensable, the companies providing these AI services can jack up their prices. Once the humans, and the institutional knowledge they hold, have been lost it will be challenging to rebuild. We will be hostages to the LLMs that we (humanity) have trained.
This blog post isn’t about AI, but the current growth of AI and its place in technology certainly influences me a lot. In my eyes, it has tainted the entire industry. Even valid uses of LLMs are expensive, in terms of power and water. Technology on the whole feels wasteful. We have computers that are faster and faster, more and more efficient, and yet software only ever seems to become more slow. Bloated. There is bloat that is for a good reason, and then there are simple Android apps that come in 400mb bundles.
UI paradigms across main operating systems are a mess. The web as a general app platform is a mess. React is a mess. I feel like I am still working in the dark ages of programming. Working in Golang and writing SO much boilerplate around everything is infuriating. I am constantly mapping, marshalling, unmarshalling, switching (without good type checking) and trying to work around the limitations of encoding optional values as pointers. Go generics should help, but they really don’t do enough for the language. Despite this, there is no language I would rather work in than Go. I would enjoy Rust, if I was in the right place, but that comes with its own challenges and demands a specific kind of coworker.
Nobody seems to understand how to reliably run a software project to a deadline. Our discipline is so informal, so weak. So often we write flimsy code that is not adequately tested. Often this is because understanding a system is so hard, and because visualizing what good testing means faces resistance. Recently I caused an outage at work by deploying some bad SQL, which passed all of our tests. Populating enough data in our unit tests to trigger this freak edge-case was not only hard to do correctly, but so hard to know what was even needed. It took me roughly a day to work out why the query was even failing.
I want to be a musician.
I was 9 years old when I started learning the flute, and it completely changed me. I did music all through highschool, and started a classical music degree specializing in performance on the flute. My memories of playing in orchestras, concert bands, jazz ensembles, flute quartets, choirs and more are some of the happiest times in my life. I was making something, I was good at something. I had a place in the world, but even more than this I had a place in my community. I performed at local events, I played Christmas songs at retirement homes. I was surrounded by passionate peers, who grew alongside me. Some people I met doing music as far back as 2008 are now some of the closest people in my life.
Music is special to me in so many ways. I can be a storyteller, weave emotions through performance, take people on a journey. I can lighten someone’s day, or enrich it by making them think, feel or reflect. For a long time I thought I was a flute player, but now I see that I am a musician. The flute is just a tool I use to express myself.
Recently I have broken into the jam scene in Melbourne. I go to Celtic sessions, jazz jams, open mics, and pretty much anywhere else they will let me make music with people. I started playing music with strangers, then strangers become friends, and now I am part of a community. I can go out to see random music acts, and I run into people I know. I can go out every night of the week without planning, and be greeted by familiar faces. In so many ways my world is shrinking - people I meet know other people I meet, friends become friends with my other friends, groups cross over and mingle. I feel like these communities have become my home.
I want to teach music, and perform music, and share the joys of music with the people around me.
My next steps are to build up casual work where I can, leaving enough space for lots of music practice. I want to hone my craft more, and refine my playing to be at a higher standard than ever before. For the foreseeable future I want to do “well enough” financially to sustain a flexible lifestyle where I can prioritize music, and have space for other creative hobbies like painting.
For 10 years of my life I introduced myself as a musician. For the 10 years after that, I have introduced myself as a programmer. Who knows what I will be in another 10 years. I still love technology, and I hope that I can do interesting things from outside the industry. I have side-projects I want to hack on, and will continue to build in the background of other things in my life. I will not use AI to write my code.
My resolution for the year is to play a gig with a band, which is something I haven’t done since I was 17. I will be 30 soon. I just got my first ear piercing. I’ve been on some fun, weird dates recently. I’m about to go on holiday in India. Life is unfurling in front of me.
I want to write on this blog more. About music, about technology, about the intersection of the two. I want to be more present in the community I built online. I enjoyed making a small scene around my livestreams, and I hope I can nurture that more when my tech energy isn’t taken up with a 40-hour per week job.
There are lots of thoughts here. This is a very strange, personal blog post detailing a lot of my life.
Ultimately, I just want to encourage people in technology to think about what they are doing. Think about the tools you are using. Think about how we make this industry better, and how we can make technology an awesome part of people’s lives. Forget algorithms, phone addiction and AI. Forge a better path.
Be part of your local communities. There is so much going on in the world that I cannot change, but I can be present with the people around me. I can share love and understanding. I hope that being kind and open in my day to day life will impact those around me to do the same. I talked to my tram driver today, he had been driving trams for over 25 years and I asked him about what he wanted to do when he retired. He didn’t know, and that excited him.
Make 2026 a year that you try something new. I certainly will.