Faultd.

I'll be honest, I've been rather bored with web development for the past couple of years. I've been doing it well over a decade now, and it's really just an endless cycle of building a similar-ish CRUD app over and over again. Yeah, there's been some novel things here and there, but it really is mostly the same. Heck, it's often the same twice - once you write the logic in the back-end, and then again in your front-end SPA. Often I feel like we're just reinventing the wheel just for the sake of reinventing it.

I've looked into an avenue out of web development, and I think I've found a solid path. It's a bit long, but it aligns with things I'm looking for at this stage of my life. Systems programming. Now I know nobody wants to hire a web dev to do systems programming, which is why I said it's a bit long. I'll first have to educate myself quite a bit, build some things, and then once comfortable enough, I can start attempting to find someone willing to pay me for it.

Well into my 30s now, I want and appreciate a bit of a slower pace to things. Web development changes from under you so quickly that you'll never become an expert of anything, and I really want to be an expert of something. I want to invest my time into technologies and concepts that will be relevant not just for a long time, but hopefully until I retire. Since everything, including your microwave, is made with systems programming, I think it's a pretty safe bet.

This, then, brings me to Tobey. Usually when I learn new languages, I like to build a parser in it or something. This time, with Tobey, I built a Markdown and a YAML parser, then put them together to form a FrontMatter parser, and then used all of that to build a static site generator, and I decided to do it all in C++. Why? Because I've always wanted to check it out, and while I do have experience with Rust, I wanted to see how C++ compares. Honestly? C++ is great. I find it very enjoyable to write and debugging with GDB via CLion is also a breeze.

It's a language that can be both elegantly simple and painfully complex at the same time, and you can choose your own adventure. I know people say C++ is riddled with too many features and that this makes the language hard, but I mean, you don't have to use every feature, surely? In any case, I'm not here to justify my choices to anyone, I'm here to learn and have fun, and C++ is providing me with both.

I'm continuing to build Tobey and will publish updates right here as I go along. I'm also eye-balling to buy a Nucleo and see if I can build something with it as well and tip my toes into embedded systems programming. I'm excited to see where this journey takes me.