The Harmonious Programmer

Change happens every moment. Right now things have changed just from the second before. This means all things in life are fleeting. Not changing is like trying to hold on to the present as it becomes the past. Why should we hold on to the past? We should not. Nobody has every succeeded at this and you should not think that you're special enough to think you will be the first.

Change is good. It should not have negative thoughts connected with it. Change will happen whether we like it or not. We might as well learn something new so we can adapt to change in ways that do not cause us suffering. The scariness of change can be counteracted with learning. Learning something will lessen any suffering that occurs from change. In the terms of IT, you'll live a happier IT existence because you will not accumulate massive amounts of "technical debt" by not changing and therfore not learning. Doing things in the "tried and true" methods don't always mean you're doing it right.

So take the plunge and make a nice down payment on the change that inevitably comes. Learn something new every day. Or if you want a different explanation in clearer wording: How can you be in IT if you don't want to learn new stuff? If you don't want to learn, you're in the wrong business.

When Simon was 3, he used to call the time after the lights were out and before he fell asleep "the talking dark"; it was one of those pitch-perfect childhood phrases coined to describe an experience not found in grown-up parlance. In the talking dark, Simon talked himself to sleep. In the talking dark, bad guys were defeated, weather was commented upon, stuffed ducks waddled into ponds. He also got two of everything that year: two bedrooms, two sets of toys, two different jammie rotations. Dad's house and Mom's house were very separate places in his consciousness, a firewall built between them so thick that once, when he was with his dad and ran into me on the street, he introduced us to each other. "Mommy, this is Daddy. Daddy, Mommy." But he had one talking dark. One consciousness to inhabit and one narrative machine with which to invent stories out of the tracks of his days.

via salon.com

Although I was much older than Simon at the time, I am a child of divorce as well. I too drifted between two households. During that time, I very much felt like I was living two separate but equally important characters in my two families. Still, I existed in my own world between the two and those lines are gradually blurring over the past years. From all of this, I had a good chuckle at the distilling down of Simon's consciousness to the causal "introduction" of his parents on the street described above. The rest of the article is rather funny as well so I encourage you read the whole thing.

Technical Debt: If You Can't Handle Change, It's Time To Change Careers

Was joint custody a mistake? (Salon.com)

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