Every November since 2007, I've played a Pokémon game. My family never did much during the Thanksgiving holiday, so I'd usually burn through a game then, even the year I first got Stardew Valley. The need for it was a little different this time around, because I really needed this Pokémon game for my sanity. The job market and overall state of the country (I'm in the southern US) have been eating me alive. Things do feel a little hopeless.

I've been attempting to be more active on the "social" internet, largely with the purpose of sharing my work with others. A lot of my time online the past two decades has been spent reading and discovering whatever weird stuff is out there. Trying to make stuff and talk to people is shockingly difficult. Messages aren't responded to much and my posts are like journal entries I throw out to the wind. Very silent. On the other hand, I have had people at least engage with me for surprising (to me) reasons. I posted a video of a tui project I've been working on and it even made it to the top of tangled.org's trending list. Why that stood out to people, I don't know. Your guess is as good as mine. I posted an article about algebraic data types a few months ago on my substack and that turned out to be quite popular among my fellow f#/unctional programming nerds.

Have you ever stumbled so hard and so frequently that you don't know what to do or where to go anymore? That's what I'm wrestling with these days. I feel lost in my career even though I'm working on my projects every day. Is there room for feelings in programming and software engineering? It has to be unwise for me to be talking about the emotional pain I'm experiencing.

One of the things that I feel very cognizant of is how mental illness is talked about on the internet. Imposter syndrome is something talked about online often, especially when it comes to how capable a person is. I generally don't have that come up with respect to my career or work. It comes up in spaces where I have to be honest about my mental health and seek treatment. I constantly feel like a fraud and often find myself wondering if my experience is even real. It's usually after I've really been put through the ringer by my brain that I feel realize it's no joke or sham.

This week has been my week of open source. It started with me working on a JavaScript framework (I know, I know) because I wanted to learn how to publish a package. It was tedious to actually get the publish pipeline working but the project itself is super fun. I opted to make it hypermedia focused like HTMX. The maintainer, Carson Gross, is a super cool, knowledgeable, and funny guy. People like him are great because they often help rekindle my enthusiasm for things.

I feel like I say this a lot but it has been a year. You probably hear it a lot for any number of reasons. There's a lot out there to be miserable about. My primary source of misery is probably my career. I left a job that was, to put it diplomatically, not great for my psyche, and since then have struggled to land something permanent. It never seems to get easier.