Six Projects

Someone asked me this week or rather I asked myself, which is honestly how most of the useful conversations in my life start — what it would take to get everything back on track at the same time. Not just one thing. All of it. Myself, my finances, my family, my career, my identity, my homelab.

That’s a lot of plates. I’m aware.

The answer I came up with wasn’t a mood board or a motivational poster. It was six projects. Concrete, named, scoped things that I can actually move on rather than vaguely gesturing at from a safe distance.

I’m not going to detail all six here. Some of them are private, or at least not ready to be public yet. But the exercise of naming them, of treating each one like a project rather than a looming source of ambient dread, did something useful.

The job situation

One of the six is work, and it’s the one I’ve been thinking about most this week.

I’ve been in my current role for a while now. I work in IT, I wear many hats, there are two of us in the team and one of them is me. It’s a lot. Not in a complaining way, just in a factual, this-is-the-situation way. I’ve been planning a transition out if things don’t improve and I gave myself 150 days to do it properly, on good terms, without burning anything I don’t need to burn. The thing is, I may not resign afterall.

The plan looks something like: spend the first stretch building a proper picture of what’s out there, update the CV, reach out to people I actually know and trust. Then move into proper active searching around the halfway mark. Then, ideally, land somewhere good and exit cleanly. Give real notice. Write a thoughtful handover. Leave the place better than I found it, or at least not worse. However, I didn’t actually need to do any of that has I’ve been approached by two headhunters this year and the latest one landed in my inbox just a few weeks ago directly referencing some articles I’ve written, specifically this one.

I’m not in a panic about work anymore but I am aware that the self-imposed clock is running. That’s a useful feeling to have.

Despite feeling completely demotivated at the start of this week and (almost) accepting that job offer, I decided against it. I hate quitting anything and I rarely do, maybe it was just the need to feel like I’m not trapped.

In addition, we made significant progress with a key project at work and despite the occasional barge-ins with unhelpful vibes, I think things may be improving. Whenever these sorts of situations arise like they did this morning, it is helpful to remember two things. Firstly, there is (rarely) any deliberate malice behind them, and Secondly unless you’re in IT you are largely clueless about what is truely going on; and occasionally confidentally incorrect.

Meanwhile, in the homelab

In among all of that, I’ve been writing. A lot of writing, actually.

The Roll Your Own Network series has been quietly eating my evenings in the best possible way. This week I finished a piece on integrating ChirpStack with Home Assistant, which is something I’ve been meaning to write for a while. The short version: the two systems don’t talk directly, but they both speak MQTT, and a broker in the middle is all it takes. The longer version is the article.

I also got February (the homelab server, third in a lineage that goes Edge and Flight going back sixteen years) further along on the networking side. The plan is for February and the Home Assistant Pi to eventually be proper collaborators rather than neighbours who happen to be on the same network. That’s a future article rather than a current problem. I’ve learned to be comfortable with that distinction.

The thing I keep coming back to

There’s a Terry Pratchett quote that’s been living rent-free in my head this week. It’s from Sourcery:

“It’s vital to remember who you really are. It’s very important. It isn’t a good idea to rely on other people or things to do it for you, you see. They always get it wrong.”

I wrote about it in my journal last night. The way I’d phrase it today is this: there’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from doing too much, but from being too long in environments that reflect you back incorrectly. Where the version of you that other people have decided on starts to feel more solid than the real one.

They’re never right, though. That’s the thing.

Six projects. A 150-day window. A homelab that keeps growing. A series that keeps getting written.

I know who I am. I’m in the process of making everything else match.