For years - through at least my three most recent jobs - I've wanted to write more software. The desire has been vague at best, driven partly by curiosity, partly by FOMO, and partly by wanting to be more personally effective - to be able to do more stuff. My jobs have supported me in broad strokes, but in my experience real progress occurs in times of real need, and ultimately my (nonexistent) skills as a software engineer simply haven't been on anyone's critical path.

Until 2017.

2017 saw a totally new pattern of work. At nTopology, I spent much of the year building an integration between Element and Abaqus, using the workflow to optimize material use on metal 3D printed lattice structures. This laid a good baseline of commits, mostly during weekdays.

Later in the year, as The Public Radio's operations spun up, my commit frequency jumped significantly. Some days see dozens of commits, as I pushed in-development code from my laptop onto one of the Raspberry Pis we use to fulfill orders. This is a somewhat weird process, and I'll admit that it has the effect of juking my stats. But I'll also note that a lot of these commits occurred on weekends, which feels like it should balance my credibility out a bit.

It's yet to be seen if 2018 continues this trend. I'm still no developer, and the level of complexity that I'm able to take on myself will probably remain pretty low. But it's nice to see some progress :)