Doing things blindly

During the course of my life, I was mainly doing things blindly. Not that I’m actually blind, what I mean is that I didn’t study that much. Instead, I always preferred to rediscover things by myself. For the most part.

When I was little, I didn’t have any particular hobbies. My childhood mainly consisted of playing outside with friends, watching cartoons on TV, and playing various games on my PC. I wasn’t good with sports, due to some health conditions, and did not participate in any of the activity clubs, like handicraft clubs, drawing clubs, etc.

My parents tried though. Once they suggested that I try joining a pottery class, but I couldn’t stay because I was allergic to the paint they used. Well, I did go to the English club for maybe 8 years, but it wasn’t my choice, my parents thought that it would be beneficial if I learned a second language, that is widely used. They were totally right, but I didn’t understand that up until I was twenty-ish or so. Still glad they did.

Going back to my childhood, things changed when I discovered Macromedia Flash. I would consider drawing animations my first serious hobby. However I never went to the arts school, and I just did things the way I did them. I wasn’t very good at animating, though I did learn a lot by myself, and If needed I can animate. If you’ve seen the games I made recently, I’d say that animation skills obtained when I was toying with Flash were beneficial to me today.

Later I asked my parents and went to the arts school. I was studying there for two years before going to the university, as I was hoping to become a professional animator. That didn’t really work out, I was told that I was too old for them to accept me to the full program, so I took courses that would provide me with some kind of certificate that should be enough for some universities, or so I was told. However, most universities in our country hold an entry contest, and you have to be able to draw pretty well to pass. So I didn’t bother with that and never went to become an animator.

Though, I think that’s good because after drawing small cartoons on my own for maybe 8 years straight I was kinda bored of animation. The results weren’t so good, and a mere 20 seconds of animation usually took a whole day of work. I was mainly doing frame-by-frame style animation, without much shortcuts, and at 24FPS so…

My second hobby was historical fencing. Yes, I said I wasn’t good with sports, but it wasn’t an official club, so they didn’t have any strict requirements. I just told the trainer that I can’t run for too long, and may need an extra break or three. They were fine with pretty much anyone, as the club was dying.

I did fencing for three years or so, and in my last year of high school, I decided to stop. I was going to move to a different city anyway, so I couldn’t continue here, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to continue there. Again, the club didn’t teach us that much, as it was just a bunch of high schoolers swinging swords around. The club did participate in some local tournaments though, but I don’t remember us winning any. So my sword skills are something I developed mostly on my own, and I can’t say I’m that good.

Right at the time when I dropped fencing, I picked up a guitar. For the second time, though, as my parents tried to put me into the music school, as they noticed that I was able to hear some pitch.

I went to music school for two months, but couldn’t continue, as I was basically going into three full-blown schools now. The English club was serious, and I had to do a lot of homework for it. The ordinary school had a lot of homework as well. And now the music school that demanded hours of homework on top of that. So we decided to stop.

Also, I can’t sing. It’s funny because I hear that I can’t hit a single note with my voice and people often think that I have no musical ear, but that’s not true. I can tell when my guitar is out of tune, tune it by ear, I even can tune to E without a tuner, though I just memorized how the E string should sound, I don’t have perfect pitch. My inability to sing simply comes from the fact that I don’t know how to control my voice. It was a problem in the music school because teachers didn’t like the fact that when we were doing choirs I just pretended to sing by opening my mouth, as I was tired of them constantly yelling at me. At solfeggio, when the teacher asked us to sing the note they’d played at the piano I couldn’t do that, and I couldn’t really explain to them why. All I said was - I know it’s not the right note, I just can’t sing it. They were disappointed, but I got by sometimes by finding that note on the keyboard from memory when they let me.

When I was in the last year of high school I picked up guitar once more, but I didn’t go to the teacher. Instead, I decided to learn it on my own. So I did, by watching YouTube videos back in 2010. After grasping most of the concepts I began to learn tabulatures, as they didn’t require any knowledge of music theory besides some basic stuff. Like the signs for stops or articulation.

Now, here comes programming. When I got to the university, the department I entered was unique, if I may say so. It was unfocused, there was little specialization, and the way they were teaching us was… not great. After five years, I can’t say that I knew how to do anything. I wasn’t a bad student, I attended all the classes. Still, after graduating, I wasn’t sure what kind of job I should get.

Linux became another hobby for me. I have been using Linux as my main OS since 2008 or so. So naturally, I thought that I could find a job as a Linux administrator or something like that. After going to several interviews it was obvious that I knew nothing about it either.

Somehow I managed to find a job as a C programmer. We had a whole semester of C++ at the university - surely it’s enough to learn C++, right? What were they thinking?

Anyway, I started working as a C programmer, writing tests for microcontrollers and SOCs. I wasn’t good at that for maybe two years, and then something happened. First, I discovered Vim, and Vimscript took my interest for quite a while. I started making plugins and enjoying programming for the first time. Vimscript was nothing like C, and the only other languages I saw before were Delphi, taught to us at the university during the first year, and ActionScript 2 when I was tinkering with Macromedia Flash.

Vimscript ignited my interest in programming in general, and I gradually became more and more proficient with C. After four years I had a Senior title and decided to change my stack because C started to become tiring. So I studied Clojure for about two months and became a junior Clojure developer in a different company.

I think the fact that they weren’t really teaching us programming at the university affected me in a bad way because if they did, I would grow much faster than it took me. A lot of my friends from school started working when they were in their third year of the university, while I started another three years after them. By accident, even.

After that, I did a lot of experiments with other languages and expanded my knowledge, and now I feel pretty confident in my skills, but I still think that I could have learned most of the stuff at the university if the program had been better. The program was awful, really, trust me.

Going back to guitar for a second, I could say that I played guitar for 14 years now, but I did drop about five years ago, and just picked it up again recently. However, I didn’t improve much from what I could do, say, after three years of learning. I’ve plateaued.

I can feel it now because I felt it so many times.

With animation.

With fencing.

With programming.

And now with music.

With animation, I did quit because it wasn’t getting anywhere. If I did recognize that I’ve reached a plateau, and I won’t be able to improve unless I take it seriously and study, I would stay at that plateau for the rest of my life. I was too young to understand this, so I just quit.

With fencing, I quit not because I’ve reached a plateau, but for a different reason, however, if I were to continue it in the same way, as I were, it would end up like that. I still train occasionally, and I know my limits, and that I’m not really improving. Learning proper fencing is hard, and there’s a lot of theory that goes into it, but I never studied anything, so hence the result.

With programming, I’ve reached a plateau after two years of working, I couldn’t improve my C knowledge just by doing tasks. I was mindlessly hitting a wall most of the time. Luckily for me, I’ve managed to gain interest in studying programming - I read a few books and did a few side projects, and it was enough to break from the plateau and rise. I feel that I’m reaching another plateau, though, maybe this one is a different one, I still have to reflect on this.

With guitar, I’ve plateaued because I only played tabs. It’s a mere act of repeating what the sheet tells you. Yes, some musicians do just that for a living, but they still have a lot more knowledge than I am. Lately, I started studying music theory, bit by bit - reading some hints here, picking up some tricks there. Once I have a bit more understanding, I might take some actual lessons.

What I’m saying is - I did most of the stuff in my life without actually knowing what I was doing. I still do, occasionally. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s just a waste of time. And time is not a resource to spare. I’m in my thirties now, and I think it’s time to start taking things more seriously.