I have a number of editors open on my Mac. There’s the VSCode instance where I type this and recently bent Minima to my will, and another where I’ve done close to 50 Haskell Exercism exercises. (It’s been almost a month since I last submitted a solution, but I keep it open: I enjoy Haskell’s mathematic rigour and delightfully perfect execution once I’ve ‘beaten’ the compiler.)

I also have the code for my app Origon open in Xcode, as well as in Eclipse for the Java backend. I haven’t touched either code base in over a year, and I probably won’t again. But there’s gold buried there: I’m pretty sure the replication and caching engine that seamlessly mirrors updates between users and devices would be useful for others out there.

I also have a some old documents open that detail the inner workings of the rules engine I built almost twenty years ago. There may be gold buried there as well.

Then on my work desktop one three-finger-swipe to the left I have PhpStorm and Toad for Oracle (the latter in a Windows VM) open on a project I’m doing for my current client. I’ve made headway these past few days and it’s shaping up. I feel something resembling pride.

For I’m doing the full, deep stack for this. All the way from vector graphics in Sketch, through Laravel Blade templates made lively with CSS and JS, via a REST API that over OCI8 talks to the beast that is Oracle, where I set up tables and write PL/SQL procedures to serve the requests. The site also interfaces with a set of third party REST endpoints, where there’s an intricate OAuth2, redirection and cross-site JS dance going on.

It’s been quite the quilt to weave, but when all the pieces decide to finally come together and play nice – as they nearly do now – it can feel almost like a symphony.

Until they don’t and it doesn’t.

And then when I step back, I get frustrated. I’m spread too thin, in too many directions.