I'd like to talk about tech. But I want more to talk about a book I re-read recently for my beloved wife. The book is called the Little Prince, and it so deeply touched me this time than it had in prior years. I'm 49 years old, an SEO repositioning myself as a Data Master here in New York City, and The Little Prince offers me just the right advice at just the right time to df.apply(TheLittlePrince) to my life.
That's a Python Pandas joke about a method of a spreadsheet-like object that obsoletes large chunks of my prior Pipulate project. The ability to self-evaluate and adapt one's approach to a recently evolved new reality is a valuable personal trait.
So I skimmed down Pipulate to only address the Google Sheet retrieving and updating part. But I digress. What The Little Prince should be called the Inner Child, because I'm starting to feel it.
Question: What happens when life or death experience forced a pilot crashed in a desert to re-evaluate his potentially abruptly shortened life?
Answer: A re-connection with your inner child that thought it knew what was important— and suffered rosy reminiscence for a rose from his youth that made him happy but tainted and teased him despite his fragility and forced-obsession with preventing the growth of planet-rending trees from taking root.
Clear? No? Well read The Little Prince (I should start doing affiliate links) and I'll tell you about how doing so clarified my vision and is making me double-down on Baobob tree weeding and the protection and ownership of an internal rose.
There are things of beauty inside of you. Your inner child remembers, even if you don't. I'm telling you that finding it can help you ignite your inner fire and love or change what you do again. You can pivot like the data you are.
Those things we do with data— the act of knowing where and how to look for it, the mechanics of pulling it in (or shifting it over to some cloud drive/database platform), cleaning or normalizing it, transforming into different or usable forms, making humanly digestible and actionable reports from it, and the visualizing under various potentially animated and interactive visualizations, are all live-worthy endeavors akin to drawing.
I further suggest that this sort of monkey-in-the-middle lightweight 1-person-show API-plumbing work also offers a certain spiritual satisfaction and well-being. It's not the alpha-male worth billions and being a slave of my past actions highly touted social program vision I had for myself. But it has its high points and merits. Nobody can take it away from you, and you live a much more free (to come and go as you please unrecognized) existence.
To learn to code naturally and expressively is good. It is the modern carpenter-meets-writer role, and the way modern real-magi. (tech) incantation-spells of automation are cast. There's always relevancy and value in.
To do things others can only imagine as magic, but to do it naturally (and sometimes under vim) sets you in a class apart and the future's new basic literacy. It's good to be that today, especially insofar as I can convince myself it's as love-worthy a form of expression as drawing, writing and carpentry or plumbing tasks. Skilled craft workers earn well because artistry in that field has value as a service.
My schtick is going to be how to teach others to get into this same gig. Earn a good living while feeding one's soul.
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