4HL and Random thoughts

First heard the term from @paulskallas on twitter. 4HL basically means living 4 hours per day. Sleeping for 8 hours (Optimally), Working for 8 Hours. 4 hours of wasting it random things like commuting, surfing on IG/Tiktok/Twitter(x) etc. The term itself never bothered me but seems like a negative term. In my opinion it's not as humans we have been like this atleast for the past 5 decades. My father worked as goverment officer, his father as well. This becomes a mindset really hard to break. Steady income from the goverment is always better.

I am pretty young some of you might laugh when I say I'm done trying to make others happy, I lived most of my life trying to make my parents proud. I am 24, On my father's side there isn't a single person who attended University/College, I studied Computer Engineering and dropped out because of economical reasons and also I felt like I was not getting educated. I was getting molded to a shape that I did not want to be. My decision of dropping out from the University and actually working as a Software Developer/Engineer upset both of my parents, It did not strike me at that time but they probably did not believe in me or my abilities. They like to be a cog in a machine from the moment they born. The mindset of being a goverment worker and just asimilite yourself after getting in is a common way to seen succesful here in Turkiye but I did not see it that way. I need to make something for myself.

I was trying to change the way they are thinking, trying to please them as much as possible but doing that was hurting me, I was trying to became something that I wouldn't be okey with. After realizing that I tried to make only one person happy and proud. Myself(Corny AF). I have a good relationship with both of my parents but I am no longer trying to live my life according to their ideas/ideologies. Sorry carried away a bit.

In this blog I want to talk about advantages of being a developer.

From waking up to attend some kind of daily stand-up meeting to staring at the screen from where you left off yesterday. Trying to remember what you were working on and how you were solving it. Continue development, talking to your Manager and co workers, getting shit done, deployment and so on. You realize the day had passed. Start to move tickets around in the Jira, update the Manager(at least that's what I like to do.) and call it a day. A typical day.

As developer we have a certain advantage, and with enough passion or eagerness. Instead of working for someone you can work for yourself, with literal no entry cost. Though we work like most workers, the experiences we are getting from the problems we are solving daily/weekly/monthly we can use the experience when building something for ourselves.

Although I do not hate the 4HL, working for someone or being just a resource to someone(or a company) does not sit well with me. I want to build something for myself. Grind for myself and create something on my own. As a developer I have seen how tech moves. As a contractor I have seen how clients act/behave for certain things, I have seen problems that not being worthy of time to actually dedicate developer time. I want to use my experiences and create something for my own. Not for escaping the 4HL but atleast I will be doing things for myself instead of for someone else.

If it fails, great. Experience. If it succeeds, even better. Without taking the first step I won't know for certain. I need to know, I need to get better. I need to fail in order to succeed later.

As developers we solve problems all the time (we create some as well), finding a problem is not that hard these days. Everyone has ideas but not that many actually takes action. Ideas matter but execution is makes or brakes things. Without execution, The idea worthless most of the time. I want to take action and execute ideas without thinking about if it's worthy of my time or not. I think I have enough time try a few ideas out without worrying about if I am wasting my time. As I said before, If it fails it will be a experience...

Thank you for reading my rant/thoughts. Hopefully something worth reading next time :)