I decided to start refining my skills and branching out more. It feels like most of my time at work is spent sharing my knowledge and experience with others, making high-level architecture or wading into application process monitoring concerns. All of these are things I genuinely enjoy, but I feel like I spend so little with my hands in the code that I'm losing my edge.
I feel sort of like.. a... lumberjack! Leaping from tree to tree as they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia. Meeting to meeting, conversation to conversation, setting strategy, keeping an eye out for log jams, but ultimately at the mercy of the direction the river wants to go. Or I'm tending a banzai, helping to nurture and shape my teammates' abilities. I really like both of the analogies, but I can't think of something in the middle.
To correct this, I'm going back to the basics and start doing katas and similar exercises. I've decided to start with Dave Thomas's codekata.com. Part of this will be a chance to learn more about Kotlin and maybe experiment with other programming languages such as go and Haskell. I'll be checking in my code here in GitHub if you want to see what I'm working on.
