The last commit of February is dated the 26th. The next one is 20 August. In between, nothing. Not a project, not a fix, not a note in this journal.
It was not a choice, and it is not a drama either. In March I took over presales for a digital payments business in Africa. In April, alongside it, the management of a computer vision programme. Two jobs, two teams, full weeks. In the evening, I no longer opened the editor.
What I believed
That in February I had learned to build with these tools, and that it would keep, like riding a bike. That I could pick up any time, at the same spot.
What it was
What happened during those five months is that the tools changed faster than what I knew of them. What I did in February with lots of instructions and checks, the tool now does with fewer instructions and fewer mistakes. The fourteen-agent template that looked sophisticated to me has become useless: the model can break a project down on its own. The end-to-end tests I considered a luxury started costing ten minutes.
And what did not change is the rest. The phone that is not mine. The environment variable with a newline. The plan that gives an order but not a duration. Everything I had written down in February still held in August.
What brought me back was not an abstract urge. It was the taekwondo club I chair, whose website was falling apart three weeks before the start of the season, with registrations that had to work in early September. A real constraint, a date, people waiting. On 20 August I reopened the editor for that.
What I take from it
The journal has a debt of honesty: it calls itself “since February”, and February lasted a month. I would rather write that here than spread entries across a spring in which nothing happened. What gets built next, from 20 August, gets built in evenings and weekends, alongside two jobs, and that is also what makes the choices interesting: with three hours, you do not build the same thing as with a week.
You do not forget how to ride a bike. But the bike changed while you were not riding, and you have to relearn where the gears are.
Five months without building is not five months behind. It is five months during which the tools moved ahead without me.
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