Tonight, I broke a policy of mine I pretty much instated in the last three or so years — never to work on web development at home.
There was a time in my life when I would go to work and code, then go home and code. It was the early part of the decade, when I had just been trained on the intricacies of web development, and I wanted to automate everything. I reinvented wheels all over the place, justifying the effort as "learning experiences" and "coding to exact needs".
And I built some pretty big sites in the day.
It's kind of weird to think my first scripts were written in 1999 — nearly 10 years ago. Have I been at this for that long?
The policy not to work on web development at home arose after I started paying more attention to home recording. Sure, I could have used my free time to learn Ruby or Python or to keep up with frameworks and whatever else gets tongues wagging on dzone. But web development has always been that job that I could do that doesn't annoy me. I can do it, and I can do it well. I can even do it for years to come. But I will never love it.
And if all the blog articles about what makes good developers are any indication, then I'm on my way to becoming a bad developer. It's not like I hide my predisposition. I don't try out every new language. I don't subscribe to any development blog feeds (but you should see the number of music sites I follow.) I code at work — sometimes — and I always leave it there. It never comes home with me.
I made a choice to learn more about audio engineering than software engineering, and I unleashed a torrent of creativity that built up because I let code get in the way. It's a choice that may not serve me well in the long run as a programmer. It wasn't a few days ago that I started working with jQuery, even though I had seen it mentioned time and again, day in and day out on dzone. And while I learned about MVC years ago, I didn't really start seriously working with it till now.
The oddest part of tonight's infraction was the fact I didn't even use my local files — I logged into the office through VPN!
I must admit working with CodeIgniter has gotten me engaged again, and perhaps that excitement tickled the part of my brain that really does like code. At the same time, I don't want it to get in the way of music again. I let a lot of things get in the way in the last decade or so.