One of the side effects of having a developer job is that I have very little energy or desire for coding in my spare time these days.

There is only so much code that one can fit into a head in one day. 10 hours of muddling around in strange languages and environments leaves that part of my brain completely drained, so when I come home, I don’t want to see any code. I don’t even feel like turning on the computer.

My previous job was a comfortable one. I knew what I was doing. I had a month or two of intense learning when we started using SAS, but after 6 months even that was quite familiar, and there was only incremental learning in small steps. About half of my job I could have done in my sleep, especially the simpler Excel tasks.

Now, on the other hand, everything is new, and there is so much to learn. Only on a few rare occasions when someone has needed something done in Excel, and asked me for advice, have I felt that I know what I’m doing.

The languages are new. The systems are new – source control, build systems, application servers. All of these are things I had heard of (thank heavens for the Internet) but didn’t really have a clue about how they work. Even the environments are new to me, since much of our “stuff” resides and runs on UNIX servers, and I had never even seen UNIX up close. On the first day I was utterly helpless – I couldn’t even copy a file from one folder to another. I had barely touched databases in my previous job, and now I’m neck deep in Sybase stored procedures. In fact SQL is the easiest part of my job since I had at least encountered it before!

All of what I’m doing is very useful and interesting. But it does take a lot of energy.