[Outro]
You gotta understand, the path that you going on, everybody can't go
And you can't take everybody where you're going
You remember I used to talk to about the story about Abraham and Lot
And how he wanted to take Lot with him?
Everybody can't go where you're going
It's not tech-related, but I'm sharing for two reasons:
My long-time partner of 4 years broke up with me. I'm pretty devastated but also relieved, and I understand that I strongly invited this situation.
I think I (/we) had fallen for a comfort trap, and I let myself give a little too much. This is typical for me, and I'd argue it's the second time it happened. There are plenty of recovering people-pleaser heavy givers like me, and we owe it to ourselves to really dig deep and ask, "Do you have the cognitive ability to stand up for yourself? So what if that makes your partner not want to be with you; you deserve better. You deserve to live truthfully."
I am still interested in re-visiting the relationship after a solid year of solitude for me, but I have a strong feeling I'm going to feel so much love from my friendships that I'll think twice before getting into another relationship (or maybe I'll look at this post and laugh).
He taught me so much about myself, and I think I "left the garden better than I found it" for him in a lot of ways. That's what his mom says anyway... I've never had a "mother-in-law" be so kind to me, and that's one of the parts that stings the most.
I am so grateful for that experience (beyond crying myself to sleep the last couple of days haha). Years ago I also left something probably better than this when I got divorced, so this Karmatic retribution and slap in the face came at a time in which I needed a huge wake-up call. My life is at its lowest on paper, but I feel mentally stronger than ever. That's just sometimes how this works.
As for tech (because hellooooo, back to me and the potential I have for success) I'm taking the second half of the Comptia+ Core 2 exam this month. Comptia A+ is the GED of IT, but I'm still proud of myself and thankful for programs like Per Scholas in a period of my life where it feels like I have no structure and nothing to lose. Rather than "having nothing," I will try my best while I'm healing to think of this as a clean slate-- a period of life where anything is possible.
Being involved with programming 2025 is weird. If you've run into this page by accident, sorry, I'm going to ramble— but it has felt that trying to make it as an individual contributor in programming feels almost like trying to be famous in NYC.
I understand my first hot take is false in numbers, but in anecdotal experience it feels true to the bone. Especially for a mid-career individual. The audacity of employment lately is out of control. I guess with AI robots from employer ATS to savvy candidate's LLM sending messages to each other back and forth about who would be "an earnest hard-worker," how can anyone know whether anything is "real" or not?And why should anyone choose to waste their time when we've all removed the humanity from everything?
Today I want to focus a little on the humanity. The weird emotional parts of learning that people don't really talk about. My learning often blows up with emotions of rage, feelings "I was lied to," or despair that I hadn't dug into something at a younger age. Anyway, this is just a thought of the day—a weird, deeply human, and deeply flawed rant from my brain that I hope will relate to another's:
I've discovered that often "advanced topics" make more sense to me than small things that trip me up (and maybe activate something in my high-functioning but likely autistic brain). Pretty tragic that I let a seventh-grade rural WV math teacher destroy my confidence in math, but I use that as a guiding light for "revenge on math." For instance, this below and all the math that goes with it makes sense to me, and I'll fight anybody who just shrugs at it and goes "whoosh."
Maybe I'll type out all the numbers later to increase my own understanding and prep for anybody with open ears. I don't know. It depends on what serves me, as I know nobody's exactly reading this post for an epiphany. Maybe, ideally, you're just curious about what's going on in my life and now you deeply regret it, haha.
In any case, yes, complex math, calculus, statistics—all of that is coming together.
However, something as rudimentary as the naming conventions at IEEE does/DID NOT make sense to me. These acronyms are already confusing and cumbersome enough, but to pile on arbitray naming conventions has really taken my brain for a wild ride. It get the gut feeling that acronyms serve very little purpose besides muddying waters, a sort of lazy-speak we've accepted. We can be dumb enough to turn a switch on or off and I suppose that's enough. So many Youtube University videos, bootcamps, and so many professionals in this field commonly don't have the answers to my greedy mind (and they don't need to have the answers) but my "toxic" trait is needing to understand pedantic information. I'm even doubting in this moment I have the full story after nearly a day of research, but this is the scenario:
Why did you name the standards IEEE 802? What is the 802 and why is the "802?" A simple Google search doesn't easily yield a human answer specifically telling me why it was 802 (so far in 2025, wait a couple months) with the details of comittees etc. Maybe I needed better phrasing, better keywords, but I'm convinced the real "job" of a successful techie is to know how to ask the right questions— to a computer or human alike. So here's my best human approach answer.
Having "802" doesn't necessarily mean there are 801 other IEEE standards. In fact, there might be more with all the subsections.
IEEE 800 DOES exist. It was some kind of rule about power/engineering, but nobody focuses on that one because it's not as popular. Likewise, IEEE 801 exists. It had something to do with telecommunication, but now that standard is basically obselete. The reason we call the well-known IEEE 802 standards "802" is because it was the next available identifier for the "800 series power systems and electrical engineering" category within this organization (IEEE 900 for instance, covers software engineering and anything adjacent to that). Isn't that kind of dumb and arbitrary? Maybe it's just my brain.
Maybe it feels confusing to a layperson because it is so proprietary. As many successful individuals say, tech is "learning a gigantic vocabulary list" to keep up with the jargon. My annoyance stems from moments when the depth doesn't feel easily accessible. This may subside over time, but it is what it is for today.
This pattern of annoyance also goes way back, but it reminds me a bit of "Primavera P6" and their naming process (they were only up to P4, but they felt they'd come so far that they needed to skip a number. Gross). I'd spent way too much time trying to find free versions of Primavera P5 to practice with. It does feel though, that in other spaces, people and committes follow our rules, even if it may not seem so at first. "IPv5 failed to become an official protocol due to its limitations. " This quick and dirty Google search gives me the quickest, cleanest answer as to why we jumped from IPv4 to IPv6. The Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) folks do a wonderful job of following number sequences, and you can follow a linear path from start to finish as each standard is born.
End rant. This won't matter in a week, but it feels nice to put a cap on the tinest annoying mystery of the day.
In other completely unrelated news I really want to get this, but I won't. But it will live on the blog and maybe eventually I'll fall prey to the purchase, haha.
https://www.amazon.com/AUGELRE-Alligator-Crocodile-Dimmable-Decorations/dp/B0D8HQRGF9
