Back in 2006 I was a wide eyed and optimistic attendee at the Cambridge (UK) Smart Geometry workshop and conference. I’d just written my undergrad dissertation on the use of computers in architecture and I had it all ahead of me. I wasn’t really up to speed with time complexity¹ so I thought that given enough smart people and silicone we could solve all the worlds problems just with “optimisation”².

Not long after this I realised that the good times wouldn’t last long! Universities were teaching my secret skills to their undergrads, they were even paying me to do it! Basic computation skills are now a standard skill for people leaving an architecture undergrad course (I wouldn’t hire anyone who couldn’t pass the fizz buzz test³). This left me in something of a quandary, I could burrow further into the stalk of my ‘T’ shaped person-ness, I could find another thing to be good at and make myself a Π shaped person, or I could head off in a  different direction and make myself roughly ‘+’ shaped. Of course I did none of these things.

I picked up on the ‘big data’ buzz word pretty early on, and spent years thinking “I should learn more about that”. I visited sensor data, behavioural economics, intergenerational economics, ethics, decision making, statistics, and a whole bunch of other things. All of which felt like they were giving me the skills I ‘needed’ for my magnum opus. But I wasn’t picking any of these things up with enough of a drive to really get into them, so I’m not sure how much - if any - of the information I picked up actually got stored. Recently I did two courses, one in product management, and one in data science, both at General Assembly. Having homework and a place to be made a big difference in how much I got from it.

But back to the main thrust of this post. The 2006 me was learning with an eye to application; probably not a very good or useful application, but I thought that what I was doing would help me do my job better. As I was endlessly redrawing Dubai metro station parts I guess that was true.

Fast forward to today and I’m probably in the midst of an existential crisis. Silicone valley thinks I’m too old, and I’m just about ready to get started. The dangerous addiction from the title is that I’ve been focusing on acquiring knowledge and skills, but in a way that is more like a medieval re-enactment nerd collects swords, whereas a warrior would have got a sword and then really learned how to use it!

I think that what I’m getting at with this cathartic rambling is that I need to focus and find a use for my skills, only learning new ones as a gap in my current set prevents me from doing something. As cool as it would be to learn Arabic, Haskell and welding as soon as possible, those gaps in my knowledge aren’t preventing me from progressing in the technology tree of my life.

Like playing Civilisation, there needs to be a reason for researching Bronze Working. I don’t have the benefit of knowing where the combined value of my skills will lead me, so I need to guess. Probably more than a guess though, a concerted effort to go in that direction and to hope that I’ve got the tools (or can acquire them) to not run out of steam on the way!