The Dreaded PIVOT!

July 31st, 2025

Write Up

This month work was burning me out and the thought of working towards my side project was a struggle. Instead it gave me time to reflect on what I want to put my efforts and time into. I spent time rereading Architecture Patterns with Python and that got me wanting to tackle a project that would invoke a lot of the teachings that are from that book. The distillery project I was working on could provide that but I was hitting a wall on that implementation. This lead me to pivot on this project.

The pivot is a curse and a blessing for side projects. It is likely the reason why I haven't been able to finish a major side project in the past but it also provides the ability to get excited about a new project without any guilt to drop an old one. Afterall it is just a side project with no customers or real deadlines. It is a chance to learn and grow.

I then was reading an article about EHRs that was posted to Hacker News (https://spectrum.ieee.org/electronic-health-records) and it got me excited again about the idea of building a system that could help at least understand the technical challenges that exist in the world of healthcare. The technical challenges there are immense but should be fun to tackle. Hopefully I can get some things rolling on this in the next month and gain some momentum. I'll try to post an August report on this.

Again, I have no illusions about people actually reading this but it is a good way to keep myself accountable to my side project.