I have hit a block. Not a writing block, not per-se. More of a mental staircase of ascending excuses. I just can’t make things anymore for myself.

I used to love bashing out small scripts in various languages. Sometimes to scratch an itch in learning something new. Sometimes just to fix a pain point elsewhere. These scripts were… horrible. But they ran. They worked. Often they didn’t have tests, but you could grok the entire codebase in two scrolls of any IDE.

Nowadays, I do most of my day-to-day work been paid to write large systems. Enterprise auth, backend orchestration. Everything is specced, tested, deployed and versioned. This gives me great confidence in what we’re shipping.

But then, these two worlds collide and I end up… doing nothing.

I wanted to make a tiny photo library script to just read some shares off of a NAS and show me pictures taken on that day in years gone by. But all of a sudden I was setting up Dockerfiles and dependencies, working out if VIPS was better that imagemagick.

I couldn’t just query a DB, I had to design a schema with type-hinting and support for migrations later on, and what if I wanted to share an image outside the network or $DIETY forbid, share the application with others.

Where do I land on the spectrum of a one-file Python or PHP or whatever script that just scrapes a glob exec command’s output, and setting up a k3s cluster with a rust-build toolchain that analyzes everything and has full support for expanding into anything and everything.

I want to solve problems. That’s why I became a dev. Not to become an architecture astronaut or sit infront of a terminal window paralysed about making the wrong choice.