Ignore what everyone else is doing

Welcome to my blog!

My name is Brian Douglas. I'm a husband to my wife and father of two girls.<br>We live together on our farm in the hills of Donegal, Ireland. We have sheep,<br>chickens, rabbits, and some dogs and cats.

I also have a hobby, which is computer science. I have a master's degree in the subject, and<br>it's handy for paying the bills.

This blog is dedicated to that hobby and my thirst for knowledge and understanding in regard to<br>the field of computer science.

I hope you'll find some of my writing interesting. If you do, then email me, and we can have some<br>correspondence, like it's 1998.

I check Hacker News and Lobsters all the time. It's sort of like an addiction, or maybe<br>just a bad habit. It started about three years ago when I would post blog links on the<br>two platforms. Which Lobsters banned me for. Apparently self promotion is wrong. Well<br>I have no friends or colleagues to post for me, so it's self promotion or no promotion.<br>Anyway, there was a time when I would occasionally find a gem from a dev blog on those<br>sites. This fuelled the dopamine hit and got me coming back for more. Over time I found<br>increasingly less content that was in anyway useful or insightful.

Today both sites consist of links along the lines of "how AI affects my fragile bubble",<br>"promote my new useless sas project", or "I'm ditching x for y". All noise, very little<br>signal. So I've decided to block the two sites, in order to break my habit of checking<br>them. No more picking up my phone and reading the mindless babble posted on there.

I predict this will benefit me long term. If there is something that I have learned over<br>the last twelve years of developing software it is this.

IGNORE WHAT EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING .

Seriously. If you want to build something, go build it. Build it your way, using your tools.<br>You can literally make anything you want with in the digital space. Why limit yourself based<br>off the opinions of some internet trolls.

Have fun making things, make fun things.