I haven’t coded in two years

Skill decay is real

I was chatting with a friend of mine earlier this week and I stumbled upon a shocking revelation -

I have not coded professionally in two years

Considering my job title is “Senior Software Engineer”, this is quite startling.

But you have tons of code on GitHub!

If you peruse my GitHub profile, I do indeed have lots of repos. I even created Egee.io as a GitHub organization to better, uh, organize the code I write.

But the vast majority of the code I write for personal projects is DevOps stuff, meaning code that is designed to perform tasks such as download things or install things. This kind of code is very different from application code and general development.

What’s worse, my career language is C# and I haven’t written anything meaningful with it in a long time. I wrote a post about this recently and honestly not much has changed. I just don’t get the opportunity to do anything with C# at work anymore.

Is this really a problem?

Writing code is not like riding a bike; you don’t just pick it back up after not doing it. I mean, yeah you don’t forget about the basics but you can’t just leap back into writing code as if you never stopped.

My skills have decayed and sadly are still decaying. I wanted to jump back into C# but honestly I’m just not terribly interested in it. My interest keeps getting pulled into languages like Ruby, JavaScript, and lately Python.

Python? What’s wrong with C#?

I don’t want to stare at an IDE for an hour trying to figure out how to do something simple with a compiled language. Sure C# is the best language ever but anything you can do with C#, you can do with Ruby or Python, typically with less effort.

Does that mean interpreted languages like Ruby or Python are better than C#? Of course not. But, better for me? As someone who is trying to get back into the swing of regular coding, yes because I can write some code and see results in far less time than it takes to write the same code in C#.

Goodbye C#?

Hold on, I’m not writing C# off yet. I’m kind of bouncing all over the place here but until I get back into my old routine of hacking on projects and writing code regularly, maybe I won’t settle on a primary programming language.

I thought choosing C# made sense, but since I wrote my previous post about switching back to it, I haven’t even touched it. There are some performance improvement tasks on my work backlog, maybe I’ll get to those eventually. Or, someone else will grab them before me. Who knows.