Liffey swim

In the context of this post, I would summarise it as the following principle. Take time to return to old things. This is because often we leave old things behind, not because we want to but our life becomes too busy and new things come and displace them and make you doubt “why” you ever did them.

To set off with a bad analogy. At this time of year, as with many open water swimmers, if you could get into their head you would hear their inner voice battling “Are you really sure you like this?”, after those first nerves pass an “one arm goes in front of the other” for a few swims you inevitably find yourself surrounded by a heave of men walking down the ramp singing Molly Malone as we prepare for the annual Liffey Swim.

It turns out that first nerves is because other habits have filled the void, the 50 m pool at UCD is warm, the sauna and jacuzzi after the swim set are truly inviting. But truth be told, they are orchestrated and routine. And in reality only a preparation for next years open water season where a real infinite adventure awaits.

Why then the hesitation? Was I scared I couldn’t do it anymore? Maybe I can do it but I will suck and come last? In reality no, it just because I haven’t done it for a while. I might well come last, but as I pull deep and lose myself in a swim I remember why I love this, I can get lost in something much bigger and more powerful than myself.

That brings me to this first post. Years ago I found joy in writing inventive software “for me” not “for money”. I was lucky to get to practice the craft of building software products and get good at it. In work I learnt it but the creative expression was something I always did for “fun”. As I progressed in my career I also found joy in discovering (in a product management sense) what we should build as a team. I really enjoy helping the teams I lead “zone in” on that focus and deliver as a team. How can invention be discovered “bottom up” and aligned “top down”? I’d lived it first hand seeing how mis-understanding between team members made a project with two people often go slower than if one person jammed it out. These new “fun” things and a wonderful distraction of a few kids meant I stopped writing software “for fun”.

I was lucky to dabble again when I started leading the Zalando NLP team by completing the awesome Stanford NLP course , and with the rise of all things ChatGPT I got to play with helping the team I led at Streetbees build an end-to-end system that leveraged this advance from survey generation to survey collection to survey processing and insights & data delivery system using. I have realised I can learn new things “through” the learnings of my team (e.g. in experimental & system reviews) but I still also love learning by doing.

So now my toes are back in the water, and this is my first post. Im currently working on bringing a site I wrote for my wife and with my wife back to life. The intention is not to make it “work” again, its to learn howto deploy in 2024 (FWIW using GitHub actions and Terraform as my CI-CD system). As with all parents Im going to try to bring the joy of invention to my kids so next up will be shell projects for them that we can see where they will swim.

It looks like I have one arm moving after the other, I’m looking forward to swiming the Liffey.