Making writing fun again

Sometime around March, writing on the View from JQ started to be less fun.

Partly this was due the novelty wearing off, and I started running out of topics to explore. A bigger part was that life became overwhelming, and writing started feeling like yet another chore, rather than a place for me to find sunshine. There were also several topics I wanted to write about that required more time and reflection, but amidst life's chaos, it was challenging to carve that out for myself.

Despite this, hitting the publish button still brings me joy. Today I was wondering how I could bring back the fun in writing.

Writing to remember is one of the key reasons why I write. So on the days when I don't have a lot of time, I think that I'll just share a few snippets of what I'm reading or watching.

Today I watched this YouTube video on financial freedom:

It made me think about what I would do given unlimited time and money. I would probably travel the world and throw lots of fancy parties for my friends. Beyond that, I'd probably also want to start my own business or write more code.

After spending the day in New Jersey celebrating my nephew's Communion, I found myself wanting to spend the evening coding. I ended up building a command line tool for querying the Google Issue Tracker. I recently implemented a version of Go's proposal review process within my team, and I saw this as an opportunity to play around with Google's internal tools and produce useful weekly updates, similar to the Go proposal review meeting minutes. Building this tool reminded me of how much I love to code, even in seemingly trivial projects. Coding for me isn't just a means to an end, but a source of genuine enjoyment. In my role as Uber TL, it is easy for me to delegate away a lot of things. This evening of coding made me think about holding onto more things, just because they are fun for me.