A few things have happened since my last post. I built two new servers (one for me, one for my brother), I rebuilt yet another server, and I started ripping/re-encoding my media library for streaming with Jellyfin. After building all these servers and spending hours tweaking Handbrake settings, debugging the Jellyfin server in Kubernetes, troubleshooting my Jellyfin client… I was just drowning in bullshit. I was asking myself that scary question — “what the fuck am I doing here?” I was questioning my motivations more than anything and I came to realize that I’ve been doing a lot of this for the wrong reasons.
I have been trying to learn things that I think will make me competitive in some hypothetical future job. That future position has changed a lot over the years. First, I was trying to become a frontend engineer and later, backend. Then after getting a job in IT, I split my focus between backend and DevOps with a little frontend still in the mix. I started this blog as a way of trying to document and showcase my learning in these fields so that I could have something to show for myself when applying for jobs. At its core, the goal was to leverage my current position and personal learning projects into a “software engineering” role. If I could do that, I would be able to check the box and call it a success.
But why? If I checked that box and made yet another lateral shift out of my current lane and into the “engineering” lane, presumably as a junior at some company where I was over-worked and under-paid, I wouldn’t get to stop grinding. Plus at that point, I would have to specialize in whatever job I managed to get. Like if I got hired to write Java, I know I’d eventually just say “Fuck it, I’ll write Java for the rest of my life”. Just so I could move onto other more interesting things in my free time.
In other words, lane jumping is great when you’re exploring the space, trying to find an area in which you’d be happy to specialize. But at a certain point you have to go deeper, not wider. Why not go deeper on the skills I’m already developing and getting paid to use every day?
Why not indeed. There are plenty of well-paying jobs that require advanced knowledge in the areas I’m working on right now. So since I enjoy the experience I’m getting and it has good prospects in terms of career growth, I’m just going to keep focusing on the fun parts of my job and let my career go where it may. Don Draper once said “This is America. Pick a job and become the person who does it.” But I’d rather create the job that I want and just get paid more for it over time.
Anyway, in terms of the homelab, I’m just going to simplify things a little. Maybe I don’t need my first try at a media server to be a Kubernetes cluster. Maybe I should focus on the things about this hobby that are fun rather than the imaginary pot of gold at the end of a DevOps learning path. It’s worth a try!