Creating > Consuming

Being over 40 now, I reflect more often on tech, how it evolved, and it's not always what I had hoped for (looking at you web & social media).

CDs in the age of streaming

Years ago, before the age of streaming, people would be listening to music on physical media, like LPs or CDs. Recently we bought a basic CD player to listen to our old CDs that we still had around the apartment.

When some family members learned that we did this, they sent us a mixed CD of some tracks they wanted to share with us, and when we met, it was an immediate conversation starter (we ended listening to the CD together). We enjoyed the experience so much, that we created a mixed CD to share with them too.

After playing around with Sound Juicer and Brasero a CD could be sent to a different continent, for our US based relatives to discover some new, Polish music.

Devices for users not for consumers

The whole experience with creating a mixed CD made me think about how we use computers these days. I wouldn't be able to create a CD using an iPad (not easily anyway). I used a desktop PC. I used software that I remembered existed years ago, it's still available, and it still works (my 11yo was able to use it too). We used CD-RW drive are a hard to come by these days, but were in most computers not so long ago.

By creating a CD with my daughter, I had a ton of fun, and family members who will receive a CD we composed for them, will enjoy it too. And this is a kind of experience I want to have more of. Use technology to create stuff, that serves a purpose, and have fun while doing it.

Scratch your own itch

A couple of more examples came to my mind. A script to ease the maintenance of my YNAB budget or a script to log our apartment renovation. Both serve a purpose. The first one, saves me a lot of time in importing transactions to my YNAB account. The second one generates a static page, so that friends & family can track our renovation progress. It's self-hosted and allows me to share photos quicker that any other service (it took a couple hours to build).

More doing

All of this, made me realize that I should invest more in creating things. I know it sounds trivial. But over the years, I invested a sizeable amount of time in reading on how to do things, and spent much less time on actually doing them. I read about multiple programming languages / technologies / concepts without using them in practice. Not a lot anyway. I read a lot about writing, but didn't write a lot myself. I think we should be biased more towards creating things. These creations don't have to be perfect, don't have to be production ready, but we are still better off by going with the creative process and by enjoying whatever we produce.