My 2025 Resolution To Write More And Code Less

This year I vow to spend less of my free time programming and more time writing about how I spend my free time, including coding. Not because I’ve become less interested in coding, nor because I necessarily love writing, but because of the facts that I’ll account for here further on.

When I went to university, taking undergraduate courses in computer science, I did not imagine that programming as an activity could become problematic for me in my postgraduate life. Not in the sense that it would distract me from the other things I enjoy in life. I merely sought it as a skill that would hopefully help me enter this new career that I was betting on would improve my life. A couple of years into it, I would definitely say that it has, however, I did not foresee that the process of it would be so consuming, almost to the point of being addictive.

While I was learning about programming concepts and practicing the skill of coding in university course assignments, I often considered the assignment report as an inconvenient distraction from advancing onto the next course assignment or from learning something practical. The assignment report either felt like an exercise in simply stating the obvious or convincingly pretending in the reflection section of the document to have some significant “Aha!” moment. Point is, I always considered it merely a necessary toil. If nothing else, to prove to the teacher or tutor that I was not just plagiarizing my programs.

Jumping forward in time to my last semester, I was interviewing with a couple of different job employers and was given interview assignments to solve and present, whilst at the same time, trying to research and plan my bachelor’s thesis so that I could make it to graduation. The school work came in second place behind the job assignments in terms of priority. Eventually, I was given an offer for my first developer job, which I accepted eagerly without much consideration of other avenues. After all, I’d decided to go back to school mainly to make it into this new career, land a job, and that was the bottom line.

Later that summer, I struggled with absorbing everything that I wanted to learn in my new work domain, while staying focused on the write-up of my thesis. Eventually I managed to having it being accepted by the end of the summer, albeit about two months delayed. It would take me the rest of the subsequent winter to find the time to scrape together a few remaining credits to actually claim my degree. “Now at last!” I thought. I was finally free to spend my time how I wanted to, learning hands-on about various areas of software engineering.

Whilst in school, I naively thought that progressing as a professional programmer largely meant becoming more fluent in more and more programming languages. Now I was quickly learning how much there was to learn simply around JavaScript™ frameworks, tooling, API design, testing, cloud providers, and more. Programming languages were just the tip of the iceberg
and there were many, many tips.

Almost two years into my career, and I feel like I’ve but scratched the surface of all the areas I’d like to explore. It feels like there probably won’t be enough time in a lifetime to experiment with all the interesting things there are to do just in the space of even web applications and distributed systems. Not to mention other areas of computing. And yet, I’ve spent a lot of my free time in recent months like it is my prerogative to try to learn as quickly as possible, and more importantly, to release projects. Never taking significant time to reflect on what I’m doing and certainly not wasting time writing about it. It can really sustain a feeling of stress or even anxiety, never looking back at something you learned or built and commending yourself for it, but always looking forward to the next thing,

Now I’m starting to realize that this is a lesson that I really should have kept from my time in school. You never quite reflect on something as long as when you write about it. Because thought is fast and fleeting, but writing takes time and you’ve got to keep your mind fixed on the subject you’re writing about for an extended period of time. Something I think most of us rarely do in our day-to-day lives. Especially these days.

So this is my vow for the year 2025 to myself: taking time to reflect and write about what I’m doing with my time. Preferably not just in the space of programming, but in other areas of my life too.