I lived the dream almost exactly 20 years. From February 28, 2002, until January 14, 2022, I worked from home. Set my schedule, made my agendæ, lived a life many thought they craved.
Believe you me, it’s not easy. You are your own tech support, your own copywriter, your own publicist, your own content creator. I lived in fear of the next computer foul-up, the next expensive hardware failure, the next unsolvable mystery buried in an out-of-control crontab.
I did have a lot of fun with it for a number of years, though. The slow-growing tsunami was, while controllable, a lot of fun to ride. I was jack-ass of all trades, master of some, an adept-enough coder to call myself “Full Stack.”
I had seen that term but dismissed it as typical techie braggadocio. “Full” implied to me that you did it all, you had mastered every language, knew the full detailed meaning and definition of every acronym, you handily sliced through thousands of lines of code with finely sharpened scissors, eating the wasted lines for breakfast.
That’s not really what “Full Stack” means. It basically means you’ve mastered a few coding languages well enough to know the principles of pretty much all the rest. To make a musical analogy I guess it’s like being a composer and having a fundamental knowledge of how every instrument in the orchestra is played, without necessarily being any good at actually playing most of them.
Hmmm, does that analogy hold up? I don’t know. Too early… If that analogy is not pinpoint perfect it’s pretty close.
But on the train down here today I was thinking how easy this is. The job is, arguably, not difficult. But it’s not the job itself. It’s how everything is taken care of… Computers, air conditioning, water, electricity. Actually that list of things sounds kind of paltry but it goes deeper. Peace of mind, I guess I’d call it.
But also the job. I love it. Radio meets reality.
Nobody wants to hear from you when you are happy, though. so I’ll let it go.
