Life was never meant to have a template. This much I do know now.
When I sat down to write this post, I had reached a point in my life (both the professional and personal) where a rebuild of sorts seemed well overdue.
Life had gotten comfortable. Predictable, even. On weekdays, I’d wake up, turn on my work laptop and get to coding. At the end of the day, I turn off my laptop, fix dinner and do my nighttime routine. On weekends and days off, I’d do my morning routine before either heading into the city for a day out (if it was a Saturday) or getting the life admin tasks sorted (if it was a Sunday).
Even a workday had its own steady rhythm. Mondays were when most of the meetings were scheduled. With a few later in the week if needed. Daily stand up meetings were a constant. Outside of meetings, it was a reliable cycle of code, test and review.
Then, in my mid-30s, came the uncomfortable reality check.
I was faced with prospect of possibly reentering the job market after having a stable career with the same company for well over a decade.
Then the questions came flooding in. What did I want to do with my professional life? What kind of developer do I want to be now? Who am I away from the IDEs and build servers?
When I did my ‘requirements analysis’ the night before, I realised that I was going to need a place to document my thoughts. Even if they aren’t the most aesthetically pleasing thoughts.
Enter: Made By Anna Lam
I originally started this blog to serve as an online craft diary for my knitting and crochet projects. With the occasional look-in from my foodie adventures.
With this rebuild of my life, redefining the purpose of this online diary felt like the most logical next step.
For the longest time, I treated those parts of my life as though they belonged in separate components. Work was work. Crochet was crochet. Fine dining was, well, fine dining. The blog became a natural extension of that thinking.
The older I get, the less convinced I am that those components need to exist.
Me.
I am not just the front-end focused .NET developer. I am the crocheter. I am the knitter. I am the lover of fine dining.
And Made By Anna Lam will be a reflection of all of it.
