Coming off the back of my December Adventure, I was incredibly keen to continue a practice of daily writing—I found the process deeply rewarding and a wonderful opportunity to reflect on my work, share my process, and be more deliberate about how I approach my projects. Now, nearly a month since I last wrote, it’s clear that, while this works well in the context of adventuring, it doesn’t translate to my typical way of working. I’d like to reflect on why.

During my December Adventure, I deliberately selected relatively short, self-contained tasks that were fun or immediately rewarding—things I felt others in the Psion community might enjoy reading about—and, consequently, that made the process of writing a joy. The work of exploring and supporting older computers is also wonderfully broad, offers a wide variety of problems, and is charmingly pure when contrasted with the myriad cultural and political shifts happening in the industry and world at large. Simply put: it is something I am happy and excited to engage in share.

As I’ve transitioned back to more work-like tasks, I find I’m taking on bigger projects in more contemporary languages that are, frankly, less fun—what I’m doing now is driven more by the outcome than the joy of the journey. Specifically, I’ve been focused on infrastructural work in both Folders, my Photos-like file manager for macOS, and Reconnect, my Psion connectivity suite for macOS. This work has necessitated spending many days bashing my head against Swift and SwiftUI, and it’s not fun to write about the endless process of working around Apple’s phoned-in APIs and absentee-parent approach to language design. It’s also much harder, working on modern platforms, to ignore the spectre of AI and how it’s fundamentally changing the culture of creation—a shift that only seems to have accelerated in the past couple of months, and one that quells the deep enthusiasm and optimism I usually hold for engineering.

With all this in mind, I’m going to go back to more ad-hoc writing, highlighting some of the larger pieces of work when I complete them, and documenting my little side-quests as and when they occur. I also hope to take some time to sit down and write about my evolving feelings around AI—specifically how it continues a decades-long trend of abdicating responsibility in product and infrastructure design.

(I note that Eli has designated the Ides of March a week of adventuring, something I suspect many of us desperately need. I have plans.)