The Quiet Revolution of Starting Again

2025-01-27

There's a peculiar magic in the moment when you decide to begin something you've been avoiding. Not the dramatic, movie moment kind of magic more like the quiet satisfaction of finally organizing that drawer you've been closing a little too forcefully for months.

I've been carrying around hal finished thoughts like loose change in my pocket, each one heavy with the weight of "I should write about this someday." The someday pile grew impressive: observations about code that surprised me, conversations that shifted my perspective by a few degrees, those small revelations that arrive disguised as ordinary Tuesday afternoons.

But here's what I learned about someday it's a masterful procrastinator, always just out of reach, perpetually scheduled for a more convenient tomorrow.

The Weight of Unwritten Words

For months, I convinced myself I was being selective. Thoughtful. Waiting for the right idea, the perfect angle, the moment when everything would crystallize into something worth reading. I had this mental image of serious writers sitting at mahogany desks, fountain pens gliding across cream paper, producing profound insights as naturally as breathing.

Meanwhile, I was mentally composing entire essays during my morning coffee, losing brilliant explanations in the shower, and watching perfectly good thoughts evaporate between the keyboard and the screen. The gap between thinking and writing had become an ocean, and I was standing on the shore with increasingly heavy pockets.

Last Wednesday, debugging a particularly stubborn API integration, I found myself explaining to my reflection in the black terminal screen why the authentication flow was failing. Not just the technical why the deeper why. Why we chose this architecture, why it seemed elegant at the time, why simplicity is deceptive and complexity is seductive, why debugging is essentially detective work with worse coffee.

And suddenly, sitting there at 11:47 PM with a breakthrough finally illuminating line 47, I realized something important: I'd been waiting for permission to find my own thoughts interesting.

The Democracy of Curiosity

There's this unspoken hierarchy in technical writing. At the top, you have the framework creators and algorithm pioneers. Below them, the conference speakers and book authors. Somewhere near the bottom, apparently, are people like me developers who occasionally have thoughts about the work they do.

But curiosity doesn't respect hierarchies. The question that keeps me awake isn't whether I'm qualified to share my observations—it's whether I'm curious enough to explore them deeply. And on that measure, I score embarrassingly high.

I want to know why certain coding patterns feel elegant while others feel forced. I'm fascinated by the way teams develop their own technical dialects, how junior developers ask questions that expose assumptions, how the best solutions often emerge from conversations that start with "what if we tried..."

These aren't groundbreaking insights they're the texture of daily work, the connective tissue between commits. But texture is what makes experiences real, memorable, human.

An Experiment in Attention

So here's what I'm proposing to myself: an experiment in radical attention. Instead of waiting for the perfect topic, I want to practice noticing what already captures my interest. Instead of polishing thoughts until they shine like conference abstracts, I want to share them while they still have their rough edges and honest uncertainties.

This might mean writing about the afternoon I spent refactoring a function that worked perfectly fine, just because its variable names bothered me. Or the way pair programming sometimes feels like jazz improvisation, all call and response and sudden harmonies. Or why I've started keeping a "assumptions that bit me" journal, and what it's teaching me about the stories we tell ourselves about our own code.

Some posts will be technical deep dives. Others might be philosophical meanderings triggered by a particularly elegant algorithm. Some might be personal reflections on what it means to build things in a world that changes faster than our ability to understand it.

The common thread won't be expertise it'll be genuine curiosity about the work we do and the way we do it.

The Courage of Imperfect Sharing

Publishing this feels like standing at the edge of a pool, knowing the water will be colder than expected but jumping anyway. There's vulnerability in admitting you find your own thoughts worth exploring, in believing that your particular angle on common problems might offer something useful to someone else's journey.

But maybe that vulnerability is the point. In a field obsessed with optimization and efficiency, there's something quietly revolutionary about admitting uncertainty, about thinking out loud, about treating writing as exploration rather than proclamation.

I've been a developer for long enough to know that the best solutions often emerge not from individual brilliance but from collective curiosity from people willing to share their half-formed ideas, their failed experiments, their questions that don't have clean answers yet.

So this is me, raising my hand in the back of the room, saying: I have some observations I'd like to share. They're not revolutionary. They might not even be particularly novel. But they're mine, arrived at through years of making mistakes and occasionally making things work, and I'm finally ready to trust that authenticity has its own value.

What Comes Next

I don't have a content calendar or a posting schedule or a grand strategy. What I have is a renewed commitment to paying attention to the moments when I stop and think "huh, that's interesting," to the conversations that leave me seeing familiar problems from new angles, to the small victories and instructive failures that make up the real texture of building software.

My hope is that by writing about these experiences as they happen, I'll not only become a better observer of my own work but also contribute something useful to the broader conversation about what it means to craft technology with intention and curiosity.

And maybe, if I'm lucky, some of these reflections will resonate with other people who've been carrying around their own pockets full of unwritten thoughts, waiting for permission to find their own experiences worth exploring.

Because here's what I'm learning: the most interesting conversations often start not with answers, but with someone brave enough to admit they have questions worth asking.

What questions have you been carrying around? What observations are sitting in your mental drafts folder, waiting for the right moment to be shared? I'm genuinely curious about the thoughts you think aren't quite ready for the world yet.

~ Yvan