The Unexpected Joy of Unemployment (and Building Geeky Little Things)
career-transition tech-projects livestreaming smart-home ai-tools personal-blog cybersecurity builder-mindset
The short version: Career transitions create unexpected space. Mine led to rediscovering the joy of building things: automated pool systems, smart home installations, livestreamed sunset cameras. Sometimes the best thing about a pause is remembering what you loved before the job consumed everything.
Being “in transition” wasn’t really part of my plan, but it has come with an unexpected upside: reconnecting with my inner geek.
Lately, I’ve been tinkering a lot. I’ve always loved the futuristic vision of an automated home and cool tech projects, but over the years, I lost the desire to spend extra time pounding away at the keyboard, only to be thwarted by picky compilers and rogue semicolons. IYKYK.
Now that I haven’t had to sit at my desk 8+ hours a day, I’ve jumped back in to things that interest me. During my summer of transition, here are a few things I’ve been working on:
- Smart switch installations: This child of the 80s loved the Jetsons and dreamed of a high-tech home.
- An automated pool refill system: Because I don’t love babysitting a waterhose, and well, because I could.
- A livestreaming weather/sunset camera: A gift for my weather-obsessed husband.
These things reignited a passion for technology and solving interesting problems. In the age of LLMs and AI, I’ve been amazed at how much easier it is to build and troubleshoot these things. LLMs really are a force-multiplier. I’ll write about the inner working of these projects in more detail later.
I’m still exploring what’s next professionally, ideally with a high-growth tech or fintech company that values creativity, security, and a little builder spirit.
Navigating a career transition? Check out my Career GPS Toolkit with free resources for making strategic career decisions.
If you know of opportunities, or just want to talk geeky side projects, I’d love to connect.
And yes, you can check out the weather cam. It’s live… I hope. I’m still ironing out a few kinks with bandwidth issues (yay wi-fi), error handling, session timeouts.
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