tomgromak.com — Writing and music from Tom Gromak — on technology, creativity, and figuring things out as I go.

I enjoyed this year’s World Cup immensely, and got completely absorbed in the stories of the teams and players as the tournament progressed. From Curaçao’s historic goal against Germany in their opening match all the way to the spectacle of the final game between Spain and Argentina, I discovered a sport that’s both inspirational and troubling, along with a whole history that I’d had no idea about.

I keep reading about how difficult the landscape looks right now for people trying to build a career in information technology, and it leaves me sitting with two feelings at once: grateful for the path I got to walk, and a little heartsick for the people just starting theirs, because that path isn’t available anymore. It’s left me with a question: if someone stood at the very beginning of this journey, still deciding whether IT was worth pursuing, would I actually tell them to go for it?

I was about an hour from finishing my website redesign (hope you like it!) when I hit my subscription limit. I could have stopped there, waited for it to reset, and picked back up later. Instead, I kept going, knowing full well that everything from that point on was going to cost me actual money on top of what I already pay every month. By the time I was done, it had cost me sixty dollars.

Modern life comes with a background hum of tiny indignities. Fill out the form. Scan this QR code. Sit through the ad before your call gets answered, and rest assured, your call is very important to us. None of it is a real hardship. It’s just friction, usually delivered by someone who has no power to change, so by design there’s no one to even be mad at other than a faceless company.

When I launched this site, I had a whole theory about what it would be. I’d write about what actually interests me rather than chasing fads, skip the tracking, and see where it goes. No growth hacking, no algorithm chasing. Just a homestead on the open internet.

A year and a half later, I’ve published more than thirty articles and a full run of monthly newsletters. It’s a real body of work now, and somewhere in the accumulation it stopped feeling like an experiment and started feeling like a practice. So this seems like a good moment to look up from the work and ask myself how it’s going.