The Far Green Country

Well, today is it. After nearly eight years of writing software, I am officially hanging up the compiler. It’s been a good run, and in many ways it is remarkable to me how much I have learned and was privileged to experience during this time. From an onerous beginning writing technical reports, to a height of creating a standalone 3D rendering API from scratch; from a callow intern in western Pennsylvania, to a plucky engineer giving coding lessons to international visitors; from a certified backwoods bumpkin to a member of a distributed, diverse software team; from a kid riding on backroads in the open back of pickup trucks, to an adult reasonably comfortable navigating the Byzantine honeycomb of the Los Angeles highway system - what an interesting few years it has been!

As most of you know, about a year ago I left full-time engineering to pursue a calling in gospel ministry. During this last year, I have continued writing software in a part-part-time role. Most of you also know that writing and publishing have been amateur hobbies of mine for several years. Well, I have recently been offered a contract from a commercial publisher to write a fiction trilogy for young adults. This has been a personal goal of mine for nearly two decades, and so I have accepted it.

In taking the writing contract, however, I have to face the brute facts of temporality. With my position as a ministerial student and seminarian already occupying a more-than-full-time slot in my life, there is simply no time to continue concurrently in two part-time roles. I can either write novels, or I can write software - but I cannot do both. So I have decided to write novels. (You fellow geeks won’t believe it, but with novels you don’t actually have to end every line with a semicolon. Weird, eh?)

Like my last vocational change, this one doesn’t come with a pay raise. But it does represent an open door that I’ve been knocking at for years, and so I take it as a providential opportunity that I must follow. To all my erstwhile coworkers, I wish you all the very very best. If you are in my neck of the woods, give me a ring and we’ll have a beer. In the meantime, I leave you with the following verse:

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
(J.R.R. Tolkien)