Been Busy

Life do be life-ing

I’ve had some good realisations over the past few weeks about the sheer amount of things that I have going on in my life. I think it’s important to be able to reflect and see that these things are indeed going on and are real. Instead of thinking to myself that I’m not doing enough / not being good enough. Just that insanely toxic, hustle culture mindset. Every major facet of my life I would say, has something going on, and I feel like I’m operating at near 100% all the time.

This should all hopefully, not go on forever. One big area that should relieve a lot of stress when complete, is the purchase of my first home. I am hoping to be in before the end of this year. Rumour mill suggests September could be a likely timeframe, but I’m not holding my breath. I’ve also been busy with work, I feel that transitioning into the senior engineer role has been taking more of a toll than I expected. Of course in theory, I’ve been operating at the level of senior for a while now, otherwise I would not have been promoted. But I think now having the title, like being able to refer to myself as a senior engineer, it’s suddenly all quite real and does feel a bit more intense.

I feel as well that I’ve been chasing my tail with regards self hosting. Trying to achieve targets that I set, namely around sovereignty and the big ticket item of moving away from GitHub. While some progress has been made, which I’m thankful for. I’m not near being complete with that work. Self imposed deadlines have not done any justice for me. But I have been a lot more forgiving of myself and just try to make progress where I can. I’ve been doing a lot more with Tailscale as a company too, I’ve been finding the Insiders program extremely rewarding. I had my first public speaking opportunity with them, at their London meetup back in May. I had such a good time, completely nerve-racking of course, but overwhelmingly good feelings. Looking forward to going to San Francisco in August to speak at the community day they’re running before Tailscale Up. Another great opportunity, another reason things are so busy!

And of course, my own personal demons continue to be a struggle. But, as I’ve alluded to, I’ve been doing a lot more work on reflecting on my workloads, being a lot more kind to myself. Which, my councillor has lauded me for which is nice. Since, I’m not often one to give myself any credit. This post, is also an exercise in being more kind to myself and recognising what I’m going through. I have had grand ambitions in terms of posting on here and what I cover, but again, there’s a lot going on. And I can write when I want to write, not that I need to write all the time to make ends meet or be some crazy tech influencer. (I never want to be a crazy tech influencer).