Because

If I don’t learn anything from an experience, I often think of it as a waste of my time.

“I’m not a programmer”; it is a common refrain when I try to explain what I do in my technology-based day job. I find it harder and harder to justify the sentiment as over time however due to how much time I spend looking at, changing, and creating code while at work.

Yesterday, I was tinkering with my Github Pages site, which for all intents and purposes works the way I intended it to. But I was bored, so I blew it up, started from scratch. After an hour of playing with new themes and changes I was interested in, I reverted back to the working version with the commit message “because”. In my mind, I was thinking “because this is easier, because this is working, because this is comfortable”, but in the long run I learn nothing from “because”.

And really, that is what all my side projects (and in my mind all my experiences) are about: learning.