My friend Kevin, frequently marvels at my lack of employment. He is an electrical engineer with little experience in the tech industry proper, and sees my ability to maintain multiple websites, with their attendant discord servers, or IRC bots as a pretty good indication of my ability to work for a commercial firm. It doesn't matter how many times I've explained to him the ableism rampant in the industry, or the use of grep(1) as a recruiting tool. He remains baffled by the fact that someone who is in his words "so passionate, about computers, technology and coding remains on the sidelines".

That question, good as it has already been the subject of several blog posts and conference talks I have made over the years; And it's a question I get tired answering because I do end up answering the question multiple times per month. My interlocutors aren't always polite or as supportive as my friends. I have no interest in detailing my experiences of systemic discrimination in the industry in writing. At least not until my patreon goes up. Recently Kevin asked a much more interesting question. Which I will paraphrase as, "Dude, how do you remain so hyped about this stuff when all you've gotten is rejections?"

The answer of course is I'm not hyped about industrial software engineering techniques at all. What I do is arthouse coding. A distinction which might be lost on the casual observer.

Arthouse Coding

I hear you asking what's art house coding? this is simply using code as a means of self expression. You see most software that has ever existed is written for consumption by a market. Whether that be thousands of users or dozens. Even portfolio projects are implicitly written, for an audience technical recruiters and interviewers. And so even when you aren't getting paid the work for hire mentality dominates the process, the code is simply a means to an end, and that end is demonstrating particular skill with whatever the latest technical fashion of the day is.

For a while this was my approach to my own projects as well, and I found myself uninterested in a dockerized ExpressJs, noSQL monstrosity. Written purely to demonstrate that I knew what all those words meant. That would be too cumbersome to run in production once I finished it. And for a while I let my shall we say ennui with current industry norms put a crimp in my coding output.

And it didn't seem to matter anyway because I got plenty of short term engagements off the work I had already done. Which consisted of mainly debian adjacent projects. And accessibility stuff.Then came October 2019, when I faced yet another at will termination for performance reasons after pointing out ADA issues that were affecting my ability to complete tasks in a timely manner. I haven't held a full time industry jobs since then. I didn't open my ide for solid six months after that. What does all this have to do with arthouse coding?

Glad you asked that requires yet another bit of narrative. I opened my VSCode in March 2020 purely out of boredom, and because I had found a bug in my screen reader software. That had filled my disk with nearly four gigabytes of text files. Rather than deleting those errant files, fixing the five lines of code that had caused and exponential growth in storage to a tmpfs and moving on with my life. I decided to see if I could build a search index for these files so I would have an index of everything I ever read since the year 2015 or so. Initially tried to do it with all the buzzword technologies of the day Django, celery elasticsearch you name it. And quickly I became frustrated.

Then by chance, I discovered the pewee object relational mapper for by the Always insightful Charles Leifer. a switch flipped in my brain. I realized that apart from me the software was only likely to be used by a half dozen users at most. And since my GitHub project portfolio didn't matter to recruiters anyway, I could write this project however the fuck I wanted to! There didn't have to be an extensive list of buzzwords, or dependencies I was unhappy with. I could just you know do things. This is what I call arthouse coding that is writing code to satisfy one's own aesthetic or artistic or practical considerations. Without worrying about the needs of a hypothetical future commercial audience.

The Secret

That is the secret to "success" over the last five years despite all the setbacks. With that first project I went nuts, it's a web app true, but a web app with a debus service for communicating with my desktop screen reader, where the task is actually a separate demon thread that utilizes cooperative multitasking, to do background tasks, no mandatory javascript at all. And until recently it was done only with CSS2 and HTML4. The search index is provided by the SQlite library. It's essentially a web app hyper optimized to serve a single user connecting on a desktop. My other projects to date have had similar "weird niche" premises. Like the IRC Bot that thinks it's a frog,Or the cat(1) clnoe whose sole purpose is to make things slower, among many others. Even the sites I maintain for other people. Have some personality to them. It's just not visible on the front end.

As it turns out this writing for yourself first The technique is exactly what several famous writers recommend you do. Although the only citations that come to mind readily are australian film director Matthew Bird, and famous or infamous technology author Michael Lucas. As an artist you are nothing without an audience true, but unless you make the kind of stuff you want to consume. You can't bring the necessary motivation into the task. I find that audiences know when you're just phoning it in. And will act accordingly. However if you code or write or whatever, paying yourself first as it were. You just might find that the audience you seek comes to you in time.

This is not a particularly revolutionary thought, but it's when I thought I'd write down.

may you find the joy that comes from within, and the courage, fortitude, and prudence to show it to the world.