Going Deep?
So far in my career I’ve always been a generalist. I’ve not focused on any one detailed topic for very long, as I’ve always bounced between a few different things day to day both in my career and in my hobby projects. Even my 2017 goals aren’t that focused on any one area of technology, they’re spread quite wide.
I’m worried that this is spreading me too thin and that it may not be the best strategy, longer term. But I don’t really know. I’d love to dive deep into one area of technology for an extended period of time and really be able to master it.
At my job, this isn’t really possible as I work on a product development team and my ability to contribute in many different places is well leveraged and would be sorely missed if I artificially curtailed myself so that I could focus on just one thing. We simply don’t have enough engineers who overlap my skill sets to allow me to focus on just one or two things. I do make progress learning across the broad set of topics that I work on, but it always feels like 2 steps forward and 1 step back as if I don’t keep working on something then my memory starts to fade in that area over time.
I think going deep into one or two specific topic areas will end up needing to be a personal endeavour for me. Finding time to do so can be hard, but I need to try.
Possibly starting the process of being a Debian Developer and contributing to KiCad parts libraries are two things which are too different such that I can’t do both well. But contributing to KiCad parts libraries and making open source hardware projects would go well together…
It’s hard for me to pick one thing to focus on and then stick with it…