Year of Foundation

I've been working in IT for over a decade now. Most of it as a Support Engineer, moving onto Software Engineer positions. Yet I chose 2022 as the Year of Foundation.

Don't know what this "Year of" thing is? Check out this post:

There are many aspects of this year's theme. So far, I've identified the following:

Health

Continue working out. Put focus on making the movements correctly and in control throughout the exercises. Even if that means doing the simpler routines, slower, and with smaller weights. Nail down the fundamentals before graduating to more complicated exercises.

Cooking

Learn the basics. Like how does one make bread? What are the different spices good for? Should I cook with butter or oil or fat or something completely different? Everything else builds on knowing the foundations, so it's probably that I figure out the basic stuff.

Blogging

Getting points across can be challenging. Gathering a cloud of abstract thoughts and arranging them in a coherent manner such that they convey the meaning you hope to convey is hard.

And I want to get good at it.

So hi! I'm Dan. This is my blog.

I want to use this space to better my writing skills, as well as to give back to the (programming) community. I'm a firm believer that writing about something is the best way to learn about it. Writing guides your thinking, and is especially good at pointing out if there are grey areas still.

Lastly, blogging acts as a simple accountability buddy to me. The theme of Foundation was a deliberate choice, and one that I didn't make lightly. By writing about it, and by documenting my progress, I'm keeping myself accountable.

Although it's my tool to report the progress, some topics will have more weight than others. I plan on mostly writing about programming and software development, but who knows, the occasional weight lifting cassarrole may find its way into these pages.

Programming

We, programmers, are essentially magicians. We write semi-meaningful words and obscure characters, and the computer shows us a message that says "hello". Why? Because that's what we told it to do.

Thing is, there's so much depth when it comes to getting the computer to do what we want it to do. Although I've done a fair share of exploring those options (I didn't just sit idly this past decade), there's still a lot more to cover.

So I'm diving deep. I'm going back to the building blocks - just shy of reaching the hardware-level abstraction. Already started by getting a couple of books about algorithms and data structures, and interpreters.

That's a good start. Let's see where it takes me.

Other foundations?

There are also the areas I don't yet know. I'm sure 2022 will throw some curve balls and perhaps opportunities will also arise. Whatever happens, the guiding theme is Foundation: Focus on the fundamental building blocks instead of the ready-made high level end products.

Of course, it's important to stay flexible. It's entirely possible that my view on what foundational knowledge is will move throughout the year.

That's perfectly fine.

Another alternative is that I realize that what I thought the fundamentals are have a level below them on which they are built, and I descend into an ever evolving spiral of Inception-esque "we need to go deeper" investigations.

That's less fine, but can still be OK to a certain degree. For example, if I were to start looking into "How does Lego work", I would probably stop at the "It's made of plastic" and not look into how plastic is made.

So that's the plan for 2022. Here's hoping it'll be a successful one!

Until next time 👋