Exploring something new

The last two years, I have taken a break from programming in C#. After eight years of programming in C# professionally, I felt it was time to explore something new and unknown to me. It is scary to do something outside of your comfort zone, but they tell me that is how you grow.

I had been thinking about breaking up with the Microsoft ecosystem for a while, and as I was just about to go on parental leave for six months, it felt like the perfect time.

The first thing I did was throw out my formerly beloved IDEs (Visual Studio and Rider). I was done with slow and buggy software crashing a few times every day when all I wanted was to write some code. After a few weeks of trying out a bunch of code editing software, I finally landed on Neovim. It was hard to feel efficient in the beginning, constantly clicking with the mouse to move my cursor to the spot I wanted to be. But I was determined to learn the Vim motions; it felt like a grind, but then it slowly got better and now feels more natural than anything I ever did before. Not sorry for investing some time to get productive with a lightweight editor and the Vim motions.

So, have I stopped programming for two years and just jumped between editors? No, not really. Professionally, I am now working as a DevOps Engineer. And outside work, I have been exploring a bunch of different languages, where Python and Go have gotten most of my love.

During my language exploration, I stumbled upon the book Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Even though the examples are written in Java and C, in which I have never written a single line of code in, it is a truly great book. Instead of writing the first interpreter in Java, I went with Go, and a few weeks back, I created a minimal dynamic programming language, inspired by Lox, called The Symbol Language.

Writing and expressing myself does not come naturally to me, but this is an effort to improve. A lot more has happened in the last two years, but I want to keep this post relatively short.

All in all, it has been a refreshing experience and fun to explore different kinds of environments and languages. I now feel more in love with programming than I ever have before.