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The simple version is that I'm a perfectionist that cares about deep understanding, and I had a good career that fit me well with distributed systems. However, at core, I'm curious and passionate in a way that requires management to smooth me over. So, I didn't want to be in big tech anymore since the game to play kind of sucks. No matter what "they" tell you, at a certain point, every company drains real creativity for one reason or another. I love coding, and I can even play the strategy game at the higher level (I 'retired' as a 'senior principal'). So, I could have a very cushy life in big tech, but my heart is to build and tinker. Low and behold, I decided to wander and build a thing that I cared about. I built https://www.adama-platform.com/ , but I could never really get traction without in person friends. Honestly, I wanted to wander and build, but I found myself in a field alone with a lot of ideas. The sheer effort to promote new ideas is... exhausting. It's just a stream of failure after failure after failure, and then my home was destroyed. I literally ran out of a burning building, and my priorities changed. Now, I could probably recover my ideas since I was preparing a new marketing push and try to meet developers where the are ( https://adamawww2.adama.games/ ). The idea was to let my ideas power the stranger topological scenarios (like cron jobs). And, given my background, I could probably have credible success raising funds around "real time infrastructure" / "pub sub" / "gateway". The problem there is then I recreate the problem I was escaping, so why bother with that. So, now I'm going to just build a barndo with a full gym and get super duper fit. I honestly think doing pull ups will make me feel 10x better than accomplishing anything in tech. |
And that is how most professions are as well. You go to school for four years learning to do this one small little thing. You practice that for ten years in a professional scope. And you trade one practice for another, say management. And then you change.
I would think in parallel to your creativity, you could find another system for monetization in education. You could also find a third system in theoretical studies.