This is a time of transitions in my life. I'm about to finish up a decade of graduate school and the future is not clear. While that is scary, it's also been nice because it's motivated me to go back and reexplored things that I used to work on/play with before my dissertation took hold of my attention and made everything else fade into the background.

One thing I've been trying to do is get my programming skills up to date. When I worked in tech 10 years ago, I was doing some pretty cutting edge things at the time - using JavaScript to dynamically load the content of webpages rather than just serving up html, for example. Now, many of those things are standard or even passé, and tons of new tools are out there that have helped these approaches mature. While seeing how things have evolved is exciting, it also means that there is a lot for me to learn.

When I first taught myself to program in my early 20s, my job wasn't particularly demanding, and my rent was low (an amazing $900 for a room in a shared house in the Mission in San Francisco). I also had the energy of a particularly driven 23-year-old. Now I'm in my late 30s. I'm still wrapping up my PhD, teaching and applying for academic jobs. Finding time and focus to hack on something every day has been tough. I started several little projects that used different languages and frameworks and flitted between them, never finishing anything. It felt like I wasn't getting anywhere.

I mentioned this to some friends at a programming meetup I go to every week. They suggested that instead of starting new projects, I should dig up old ones and update them using new technologies and programming idioms. I was fixated on making something new and shiny, so it took a while for this advice to sink in. Once I did try this strategy out, it worked great. Launching a few projects (including this little website) have gradually allowed me to dust off disused parts of my brain without diving into 1,000 new things at once. I have discovered that while there are new tools out there, many things haven't really changed since I was working in web development in the 2010s.

Here on this blog, I'll talk about the process of resurrecting old projects--and creating new ones. I hope it helps other people get back into the game, but if I'm just talking into the void that's fine too. Writing all this down is a good reminder that you can always start something new, but exploring new things does not necessarily mean abandoning your past wholesale.