Back when I was still super pregnant I attended a fun, informal working meetup with some old colleagues of mine. Despite having made no progress on any particular project and feeling as if I had nothing to contribute, everybody was super supportive of my needs and feelings, and asked me a lot of kind questions. Yeah, they’re that kind of awesome folks. While I did hear some of the classic “you just gotta make time” input, they also struck down a mental block I’d been having: the idea that if you’re going to create something, it must be creative, new, and unique.

Did I say this was the year of the mom programmer? I did, didn’t I. 🤔 'Still alive'...get it? A quick note - if you want to tl;dr this post here it is: “I have been unable to complete either a project or a blog post since my last post in January and here are a few thoughts on the subject.” Still here? Please continue! Many months later (after the second child has arrived), here’s what I know:

I haven’t written - or programmed - anything since last October…yikes. When was the last time you went that long without touching your keyboard? 😬 In fact, today is the first day since my last post (again, last October) that I’ve even sat down in my home office to do more than vaccum dust bunnies. It’s wild, you know? I used to sit at this desk every day, from 7:30am through 4pm, like clockwork, like a truly driven, hardworking maniac.

I friend recently pointed out to me that it’s been 1 year since I left my job. I hadn’t been paying particularly close attention, largely because it (apparently) wasn’t very important to me. But having someone congratulate me on it made me sit back and think about it a bit. After choosing to leave a job that burt me down to a withered stump (or, you could say, I allowed to burn me down to a withered stump), let’s have a retrospective, shall we?

The Journey So Far I’m building a web app/Chrome extension pair that allows your bookmarks to “decay” (grow old and disappear) over time; the intention is to encourage you to actually read those tabs you have open as opposed to letting them linger until your browser crashes. The app is built, data displayed, bookmarks properly styled with decaying animations, so now I’m adding additional data interaction and the ability to set the decay rate.