Jump into the rabbit hole #

Currently I am working on a project that is using technologies I have learned 5 years ago for the sake of learning them. At that time I didn’t have any useful appliance for them other than learning them out of curiosity. I even doubted myself while learning because it seemed like a stupid investment of time but even so I thought it was cool and I kept doing it.

Soon, the ideas that I was discovering started to cripple in my day to day job to an even increasingly positive benefit towards the quality of my work, the way I was able to think and reason about problems - I felt like all of a sudden I had replaced a rock with a hammer and a screwdriver. 

Having those new ideas felt strange at first. Not knowing where they came from made me feel like an impostor, what made it worst was that I was getting my way more often than not. This had a spiralling effect of thinking what if I was making things

In retrospect, it took some time for the ideas I was learning to integrate deeply in my way of thinking. Deep down I had the conviction that I was doing the right thing but I didn’t knew how to reason about it yet, like the super heroes movies when the hero first discovers their super powers but more often than uses them incidentally and not deliberately. 

Even tough now it might seems like a waste of time because you are over engineering something, over thinking something - you never know what you might learn during the process, you never know what new connections you might explore that someday might be useful to know how to approach something, or what to avoid.

It has been a while since I haven’t jumped in a rabbit hole and I miss it. I feel like I’m missing out on playing with cool stuff others have built, read about weird stuff others have written about or just get lost in threads on the internet.

Encroachment and stiffness are not something that we notice growing everyday but for sure we fill them when we attempt to jump. Keep yours at bay by jumping more often.