McKay Archibald

To jumpstart a routine I have set up a short-term challenge for myself. Even though I seldom run, lately I have been intrigued by the culture that surrounds the sport — from the run clubs to the colorful shoes. The focused discipline and incremental improvements running devotees preach about appear to result in a rewarding framework to live by. Small, sometimes tedious, workouts compound into stark progress. Watching the communal camaraderie and the overall satisfaction that comes from this activity has almost convinced me that I need to start running… almost. In this spirit, the challenge I will be working through is a code-writing marathon: 27 consecutive days of writing code for at least one hour. It will be small, sometimes tedious, work that I hope will lead to a stronger skillset. Here is what I will be working on:

Hourglass

Enter an amount of time and this application will display a visual representation for you. Like an hourglass, the display will start as a blank white screen that will fill with color as time passes. It’s a simple concept that will be a suitable mechanism to learn how to write in Swift.

Squares

As grid is drawn on the screen, a countdown begins. On go two competing players must flip as many squares to their color as possible until time is up. If you click on another players square it becomes yours. The player that ends up with the most squares wins. This fun build will help me learn how to generate live interaction between two different people.

Shipdash

This one is the most straightforward — a basic web application that will communicate with the EasyPost API to help customers purchase shipping labels. Many of these applications exist, but often the design of these applications is lacking. I will make an attempt at taking on established design patterns and practice building a full-stack application.

Cyclo

Riding around Salt Lake city on a bicycle can be rough if you don’t know which roads to take. This application will be a map where streets are rated on a scale of bike friendliness — as voted by community members. Where other applications provide routes based on the time it take to get from one location to another, this one will create the route with the most bike-friendly infrastructure.

Hi, I'm McKay. In the recent past I worked as a software developer at a startup. In the time since that job I've written very few lines of code and, if I am being honest, what I have written has been lackluster at best. After some time away I feel drawn back in. I'm like Michael Jordan returning to basketball after his first "retirement", except that I am not the greatest to ever do it and I didn't make the choice to walk away so much as I was laid off. When Jordan announced he was coming back to play basketball again he sent a fax, it was 1995 after all, to the press that said two words: "I'm Back".

I learned to write code because of a genuine fascination with what it can be used to create. I left the last company I worked for bitter about the business that surrounds it. Growing up I was always creating: using a video camera to film movies, taking pictures to create stop motion animation, drawing animated shorts frame by frame, tinkering in a basic engine to create video games, selecting instruments in an editor trying to create music. Each one of these projects had a common element: opening a piece of software; a tool created with code to help craft a vision. It didn't take long before I learned to code and saw the possibilities that this opened up. Versatile in it's use, code serves as a building block for creative vision.

Somewhere along the way, I lost the plot. I entered adulthood and found there was less time for aimless creative pursuits — it turns out you need to make money to survive. Writing code became the skill that I used to make that money and as I did, I slowly drifted further and further from the creative elements that drew me to it in the first place. The amount of money I made became the focus as I jumped into whatever job would pay me the most. Instead of finding fertile soil in which I could nurture personal growth, I forced myself into whatever box my current employer wanted me to fit in. If the checks cashed, personal fulfillment be damned.

I am no proponent of the idea "follow your passion and you'll never work a day in your life". The nature of work is that there will be a grind that comes with an attached misery, but there is something to be said about being able to connect with the work that you do.

Concurrent to the advancement I made, a worldwide pandemic kicked me out of the office and into my apartment and where the work I did became more and more isolated. A series of events led to a personal crisis and the weakened tether that connected me to the skill that was the source of my income broke. I stopped caring and lost interest. The realities of business in the American economic system during an uncertain time caught up with me and I was let go from the position I had chased after. The lure of cash lost it's strength and I could no longer keep up.

During this involuntary sabbatical, I have rediscovered a creative drive and have found some balance. Aimless creative pursuits have begun to reemerge fueled by a curiosity that laid dormant for so long. I feel excitement as I enter a new phase. Where it will take me is unclear, but I look forward to finding out.