Re-purposing Skills

I’m retired but I still do a lot of projects. Most of them are solitary projects with perhaps one collaborator. They are by and large not software projects, they are wood working, music, art, writing and publishing projects. I don’t work for the client of these projects and in many cases I am one of the clients of them. My role is diverse: designer, manager/planner, engineer, fabricator, and delivery guy. Schedules and priorities are mostly mine or very much in my control. I have a great deal of latitude to decide what is “good enough” and what is “done.”

I find that my life before I retired provided me with a lot of the skills that make this new life satisfying. I have a lot of experience looking at a large task and breaking it down and prioritizing it into a series of smaller tasks that are reasonable in scope. I readily recognize what is going to be difficult and that allows me to focus on those tasks and spend time figuring them out. The main psychological benefit of this is that I’m not afraid of big projects because to me they’re just a string of little projects.

Over the years I’ve gained the knowledge about myself of what I’m good at and what I’m not good at. This has allowed me to plan things that challenge me but also play to my strengths. For example, I am not good at very fine details that need to be perfectly executed, and though I admire the skill of people who can do this my personal taste leans more towards restrained details. I generally plan my designs with this in mind.

In my career I learned to believe in myself to be able to learn on job what I need to know in order to succeed at a task. In fact it is really the learning style that is most effective for me, classes and school were never very engaging for me. This also reduces my fear at perhaps getting into a project and then not being able to finish it.

I also learned to “grind,” which is where you have to do something day in and day out for a long time in order to finish a project. In the old life it was testing, bug reporting, triage, bug fixing, building, repeat… in the new life it is building a sub component, test fitting everything, taking it apart, adjusting or building the next thing, repeat… until you’re done.

Probably the most powerful thing is patience. Once you accept that something is going to be challenging and is going to take a long time you can settle in to a process and drive it to completion. I wasn’t patient at the beginning of my career but by the end of my work career people would often comment on how patient I was. I am happy to say that I’m patient with myself as much as I was ever patient with my co-workers.

Finally, having a personal process and incrementally improving that process was something I learned in my career. It allows me to plan projects that are going to teach me something new and keep the rest of the process constant while I do that. If something doesn’t work, I just don’t do that again. I look back over the last four years or so of projects and I can identify the process and infrastructure improvements that have been added to my process and it is very satisfying.

In any case these were just some thoughts that were going through my mind for a while recently so I figured I’d share them.

New York, New York

We just got back from our second weekend in New York City in less than a month and being there again after a couple of years absence has made me want to collect my thoughts about the place.

The first time I went to New York was back in 1984 when I was working for Shaw Data Services a portfolio accounting firm that handled the accounting for a number of portfolio management companies on Wall Street. I was quite young, nineteen, and I had never even been on a plane at that point. I had to wear my department store jacket and tie previously only worn of the odd wedding or funeral and my uncomfortable big-boy shoes. We took the Eastern Airlines shuttle from Boston down to LaGuardia. Coming in over the city I remember being amazed at the sheer size of it looking across all the boroughs as the plane descended for the landing. The cab ride into Manhattan was equally overwhelming, all the different neighborhoods, the river, the skyline, the density of it all. The city was very different than it is now, much dirtier, grittier, many neighborhoods a lot less gentrified, the shops a lot less polished and branded. I was glad that I was with my older colleagues who had done this trip many times. I enjoyed my first very expensive deli sandwich and was introduced to the magic concept of the “expense report.” Our office was in the Chrysler Building and the facade and looming size of it made the place seem much more important than it really was. The whole thing made an impression on me, but I really wasn’t sure if I liked it.

Over the years I visited New York City a lot for business and then bit by bit for pleasure. I started to get a grip on the geography of the place, how to use the subway, and the New Yorker’s way of walking many blocks quickly. It was in later trips to accompany my wife on her publishing related trips to NYC that I started getting up early in the morning, choosing a direction from our hotel, and setting out on a many block walk in that direction. I would choose a new direction each day we were there. I would take photos of stuff along the way that caught my attention and I really enjoyed the way the same street or avenue would transition from industrial, to residential, to riverfront, from fancy and upscale to a little bit gritty. I had at that point also gotten to enjoy the anonymity of being in such a large and dense city, I felt very invisible and calm and for me it is always a great place to just be present and let my thoughts flow without a lot of examination. There are so many great places to walk in NYC, Roosevelt Island, The Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park, The Battery…

I’m a big fan of Jazz and New York is a world nexus of Jazz, lots of great venues, a high density of artists who live there, a place that folks go to “make it.” We’ve flown to New York for what my wife terms a “Jazz Emergency” like when Oscar Peterson was doing what was turned out to be his farewell tour. I got to see him before he passed away at the iconic Birdland Jazz Club. In 2017 I discovered New York City Winter Jazz Fest, in a miracle of timing my wife had a Baker Street Irregulars Weekend at the same time as NYCWJF and I tagged along and bought a pass to go to one of the Jazz Marathons in Manhattan. I walked from club to club in the freezing cold and slush down in the area around Bleeker Street and watched act after act that were totally new to me until the wee hours of the morning. Being in those crowds, having those experiences changed how I felt about New York. It’s hard to describe but it’s an event that I’ve attended again and for many nights and I can honestly say I was very sad when I couldn’t attend due to the pandemic these last couple of years. It’s a special feeling like maybe of folks singing in church where there’s a group connection through music.

I like cities in general and I like the texture, grit, and the special things that you just have to know about. I love finding an interesting bar or a restaurant that is excellent but not famous, or just a great location to look at a new view of the city from. I collect places that I like to return to over and over again and when they close it motivates me to search for something to fill that void. The great thing about NYC is that you can find sublime food and drink across the entire spectrum of cost and heightened design and presentation. I think it’s because folks actually live in all of the areas of the city and so they allow a diversity of shops and restaurants to exist and sometimes to thrive.

We’re museum people and NYC is a great museum town, part of every recent visit is figuring out the museuming that we’re going to do. We’ve of course been to The Met, The Frick, etc… all the famous museums multiple times and they are fantastic to get lost in. More recently we’ve been focusing on smaller museums like the National Museum of the American Indian which has an amazing collection and very modern and socially conscious interpretation of their exhibits. There are of course rules to museuming, it needs to be a focused minimum of two hours, only ending grudgingly when everyone is whining “my feet hurt,” and “I’m so hungry.” And you can never leave the museum without browsing the book store and gift shop.

I guess I’d say now every time I leave New York I’m quietly plotting my next visit…

Fixing, making's sibling...

Back when I was a software engineer I really enjoyed fixing bugs, my bugs, other people’s bugs, old bugs, new bugs, difficult to reproduce bugs, you name it. There was something about figuring out the problem, making the fix, closing the bug report and watching the tests pass. Very satisfying. And you could get into a groove and do hundreds in a row if you wanted to.

I was thinking recently about the fact that I’m a lot more likely to try to fix stuff around the house myself than I used to be. Part of why that’s true is I just have more time since I retired. But, a bigger part of it is that since I’ve been making more stuff of size and complexity I’ve got a lot more confidence. Also, some of the skills that I’ve had to learn to make things are also skills that are useful for repairing things. A good example is the seat cushion on my leather recliner in the living room. It is probably ten years old and the seat cushion foam had given up from lots of use. I had just done the upholstery for the Morris chair that I built and I realized that I could probably restore my recliner using the same skills. I ordered a replacement foam cushion from Foam Factory ( these folks are awesome BTW, fast, high quality, easy web site ) and then I gave the whole chair a nice conditioning with saddle soap. When the foam came I just extracted the old foam and got rid of it and inserted the new foam. Now the chair is like new ( actually better because I used a higher quality foam than the original manufacturer ).

And that’s another aspect of making and fixing intersecting, the tools and materials. Once you start understanding the what’s available for materials that are pre-processed ( I’m not going to get all the tools to cut 6” thick foam from raw stock for the few jobs I’d ever do…) you can do better fixes. And having a drill press and a band saw makes doing lots fixes simple and easy.

After looking at renting a power washer ( all the ones for rent looked like kicked shit ) I ended up buying an inexpensive electric one. I’ve power washed our decks ( I used to pay someone to do it) but also I realized that it would take all the pollen stains, lichen, mold etc… off our teak deck furniture. It does a great job, I am going to have to sand it a bit and oil it now but it looks great. My new found wood finishing skills and tools will come in handy.

I really like not wasting things just because they had some minor defect. I also like not having to find an negotiate with someone else to do the work. Rebuilding a couple of mountain bikes from the 1990’s into cruisers for me and my wife is a good example of this. When I tried to find a bike shop to do it they basically said I’d have to wait forever to get them to do it and why didn’t I just buy a new bike… They’re great bikes and there wasn’t anything important wrong with them but the system is set up to discard things and replace them, not maintain or fix them.

There’s also the peace of mind of not walking past something that’s sorta broken day after day and having that feeling of “I should really get that fixed…” sometimes for years. Now I can just fix it.

Thoughts on making stuff

I spent forty years in the software industry “making stuff” albeit virtual stuff that only existed inside a computer. I really enjoyed the magic of that, especially in the beginning. It was just really satisfying to create something that solved problems for, educated, or entertained other people. I would regularly get into a groove when I was coding where the outside world receded and I was just happily occupied with what I was making and the flow of solving all the various problems that came up as I went. It was very much a joyful and rewarding state of mind, literally the “Flow State” described in psychology. I think it was the reason I came back to being an individual contributor over and over again once I’d made the transition to management. I missed that feeling and the constant interrupt driven nature of management just didn’t deliver it. At least I never figured out how to achieve it as a manager.

When I retired, some of the first projects I did were personal software projects that I’d been meaning to clean up and make useful for other people ( y’know with tests and shit ). I had several really nice months doing those projects and getting them into a good state. At the same time I started to explore making other non-virtual things primarily through wood working. I have always been a huge fan of wood workers, blacksmiths, machinists, and mechanics. I loved watching “This Old House”, “The Woodwright’s Shop”, “The New Yankee Workshop” since I was a kid. Now that I’m retired I follow a lot of makers on YouTube like “ABOM79”, “Wintergatan”,”Simone Giertz”,”Laura Kampf”, and “Jimmy Diresta” to name a few.

Even with the first few projects that I did I would almost instantly enter that Flow State again and hours would pass and I’d look up happy and calm and be surprised that I was late for lunch or that it was dinner time. I’ve gravitated more and more towards wood working projects because I’m learning so much with each project it feels like the early days of being a programmer. It’s like magic when I design something and then build it and it comes out the way I imagined it. And unlike software, the objects I create exist outside a computer and can have a life completely independent of me.

Another cool thing about wood working is that it really doesn’t have any emotional baggage for me. Where coding is also very engaging and satisfying, it reminds me of all of the ups and downs of my career. Not so with wood working, it is literally like a dream come true. The last five years or so of my career I would go for a walk every morning and one of the recurring “visualizations” I would meditate on was one where I would build a shop and make stuff, using all of the stuff that I’d seen on television since I was a child. Well, that’s what I’m doing.

I understand what a cliche I am: “Old affluent white dude takes up wood working.” All I can say is that I come to it honestly through a long line of ancestors who built stuff crude and fine down through the ages. I appreciate the amazing gift of time and resources that allows me to do it now. I do my best to give back through other channels to help other folks get what they want out of life too. I’d also note that I don’t have a fancy top of the line shop, I have a small basement and garage and decent hobbyist tools, and that’s how I like it. I want to let the shop and the tools evolve with my projects, or not. I’m in it for the experience of building the things, not as a collector of high end equipment.

Nothing that I make is flawless, some of my earliest projects have some quite significant flaws, but we’re still using them and the flaws are part of their story. I’m getting better, I make different mistakes now, and the flaws that I see are smaller. Fortunately a career of delivering software which regularly shipped with thousands of minor defects taught me to be philosophical about defects and the value of iterative improvement.

I just wanted to share a few thoughts and feelings about this for what it’s worth.

Cheers,

James