[rdegges]

I work as a manager of a Developer Relations team, but I'm also a software engineer and writer. I've identified two things I "love" to do in my life: writing software (usually automation-type things that make my life or someone else's life easier), and writing (articles, books, etc.).

I discovered that I love writing software when I was a kid (maybe 12 years old?) by writing automation bots for video games: it was so incredibly fun to write a bot that would play the game, level up your characters, and do things that would otherwise take thousands of hours of human grinding to achieve. This passion never left me, and now, more than 20 years later, I still spend a good chunk of time building little scripts/tools/utilities/apps that help me in various ways.

The writing was something that I also got started on early. I discovered my love of writing through IRC where I'd routinely answer people's programming questions and eventually write blog posts explaining answers in more depth than I could fit into a short IRC conversation.

I don't blog as much today (life gets busy), but I do spend a lot of time writing at work, working on the occasional long-form blog post, and ... journaling.