Focus Time

📅 2024-04-20

🏷 Life

🏷 Lagrange

At the moment, one of the biggest challenges for me is finding focus time. Living with small children — the younger one is now 1¾ years old, or 20 months — there are certain rhythms and patterns to life that make it difficult to concentrate on any one thing. Interruptions are frequent and attention always divided.

As you can imagine, this is extremely detrimental to programming. If I find myself with, say, only 5 or 10 minutes to write some code, it is difficult to make progress on any given task. And even if I do, chances are that I'll introduce a plethora of fresh bugs in the process. This is largely the reason why the Lagrange repository has not seen much activity in 2024 and I've just been slowly patching things up since v1.17. (Today, I fixed a regression with text selection markers in the mobile port.)

Another thing I've missed so far is going to the movies to see Dune Part 2, although I'm not sure whether it's the requisite babysitting rigmarole that's been holding me back, or the notion of sitting still in a chair for three hours straight — I tend to get quite uncomfortable at the two hour mark. Oh well, I'll catch it on streaming in the summer (probably in one hour chunks...!).

I know my situation will improve in the future, but who knows in how many months? I don't mean to complain too much, though. Fatherhood easily outweighs my hobbies, and generally things have been going rather well recently.

Eventually, I'll get to immerse myself in bits and bytes again.

skyjake's Gemlog

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