Novelty

novelty: the quality of being new, original or unusual.

I've had this thought in the back of my head for the past couple months about novelty, and how my life lacks it. Everything I do is structured to a T, and there's little room for letting the novelty of new things to take effect. This in a way is what I need to survive but I'm starting to feel like a little novelty every now and then does the soul good.

Lately I've been exploring game development and I'm finding it quite cool to be a beginner again and needing to rethink foundational stuff again. I've never thought of myself as a programmer, instead liking to think of myself as a problem solver that sometimes uses code to solve problems. I like when I find a solution that doesn't require code to solve elegantly, but then again I like being able to use code to solve problems equally.

Maybe this is the imposter syndrome in me talking, but I struggle to feel like my skills are adequate when you could compare to people submitting to Ruby on Rails, or doing other open-source projects. But I suppose I've always thought of myself in this way and I've been okay with it, because to me all I care about is solving problems for myself, or other people at the end of the day. Coding is just one path to the end.

So yes, novelty: I'm enjoying the newness of game development. Having to google things again, not knowing the "best" way to solve a problem and just... coding with imperfections again. If you solve a problem you're trying to solve, does it matter if it's not perfect? What even is perfection?

Be a little more novel in your day to day, you might find it refreshing.