Your writing has stayed with me, and I occasionally remember bits of your essays many years later. Pleased to see your articles in recent months in the New Yorker. Congrats on being a dad!
I wrote with a friend his memoir about climbing - The Crux: A Climber's Search For Meaning In Sport, Death, and Change. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0834P85QG/
It was a fun project that took a year to write. The programming bit went into developing a page for pre-orders and fulfillment using stripe and other tools. But suffice it to say, I liked writing a lot more.
It has a bit to do with the type of work arrangement I want for this phase in my life -- nearing 40 and splitting my time between two geographic locations where active computer time all the time becomes challenging.
I also wanted to move away from working for corporations to working for/with people instead.
If you have an itch, I say go for it unless you're on a track you absolutely don't want off of ever.
It depends on the situation. If one is a lawyer who wants new skill sets and perhaps even a career change, an absolute yes. I did this transition seven years ago and left law entirely. I've met a handful of other interesting ex-lawyers who have made the switch from law to software and have been satisfied with the choice.
At the beginning of this year, after trying to explore what I wanted to do for the next stage in my life, I decided to get back into the profession as a solo practitioner and transition away from software development. I'm officially back to practice, and I'm surprisingly happy with my professional life - something I never thought would really be possible.
If you're a practicing lawyer who wants to give yourself an edge as a lawyer, I think it's more important to understand the concepts and principles as opposed inventing or finding the barely existent job of coder/lawyer for a firm - I don't know the name of the role, and I've seen it touted by legal tech folks - but these are elusive. Understanding what's possible, I believe, is by far way more important. For example, I've worked with countless non-coding project/product managers, and they've been great contributors to the process in software development.
My recommendation for lawyers? Do the Python track on Codecademy over a summer and read Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software.
This is a very interesting look at climbing as it relates to knowledge transmission.
Prior to YouTube, learning proper form really required you to probably take lessons and live/breath/be super friendly with some really good climbers as a necessity. Now, you can watch a number of good climbers online on having proper technique to get 70% there.
Stuff like this was nearly impossible to convey by book. If you want to learn how to be a better swimmer for example because you didn't take up swimming until you were in your 20s, it was very difficult. I did this as an adult, and each private lesson with an instructor to improve my form was $100 in recession dollars. Now, you can gather so much online and iron out the wrinkles with live instruction.
Disclaimer: the video linked above is my friend's YouTube channel.
It really is something. I remember a friend from childhood who gave me a pirated copy of the original Sim City. He's now a city planner in Los Angeles.
I was editing a traditional document on a processor called Scrivener, and my worst fear is an errant change unknown to me after saving the file. Going strictly on something like vim might be too hardcore, but if I started out with something like Scrivener, then port to .txt and commit my edits, and bring it back out to Scrivener for compiling, it may make sense.
I haven't looked into too many of my options, but if anyone else doing a decent amount of writing can share their tips, please do!
Flashing back to Seg Reg class over a decade ago, I could not have imagined we'd talk about such a scenario -- granted, I didn't know what a pointer was, and that hashing in my vernacular did not involve cryptography.