“The bad news: You’re falling through the air with no parachute. The good news: There’s no ground.”
— Chögyam Trungpa

I’m going to keep this first part short:

I got my first account on a Unix machine some time around 1991 or 1992. Up until that year I’d almost solely used 8-bit computers at home, but had some experience using a DEC PDP-11 in college to work on the school newspaper.

“Unix” became my home environment – the place I wanted to be regardless of what I had to use. I was a little late to Linux, finally getting it installed on a machine in ‘95 or ‘96. I lucked into a freelance gig where I could write about Linux. I co-authored a book about Linux. I got some gigs helping complete books about Linux during the heyday of tech books, when Borders or Barnes and Noble had large tech sections. There are a lot of people in the world who read my chapters on how to use the command line in Linux. If they didn’t read about it in the original edition of a doorstop-sized “Unleashed” book I contributed to, which I think was about Red Hat, then they read the mildly revised editions for other distros.

I completely subscribed to “The Elements of Style: UNIX as Literature":

“UNIX system utilities are a sort of Lego construction set for word-smiths. Pipes and filters connect one utility to the next, text flows invisibly between. Working with a shell, awk/lex derivatives, or the utility set is literally a word dance.

“Working on the command line, hands poised over the keys uninterrupted by frequent reaches for the mouse, is a posture familiar to wordsmiths (especially the really old guys who once worked on teletypes or electric typewriters). It makes some of the same demands as writing an essay. Both require composition skills. Both demand a thorough knowledge of grammar and syntax. Both reward mastery with powerful, compact expression.

“At the risk of alienating both techies and writers alike, I also suggest that UNIX offers something else prized in literature: a coherence, a consistent style, something writers call a voice.”

Like a lot of people, I ended up migrating to Macs once OS X came out, but I did so because there was Unix in there somewhere.

But today I don’t live in a work world where it’s a meaningful skill set. I spend a lot of time making decks and working on documents. I use a lot of browser-based SaaS for work. There’s pretty much nothing to script at work, and when I do spot things where I could, the right play is invariably to drop a few suggestions about how to best write that script to the person I’m paying to do that.

I’ve worked on a few personal projects over the past few years that were meant to help me keep my hand in: TUI apps, a CLI interface to the SmugMug and flickr APIs, etc.

But I have also had to admit those projects haven’t been particularly sticky, even though I spent a lot of time making sure they mapped to my sense of How Things Should Be, because a command line/shell orientation makes less and less sense to me. There’s friction getting things in and out of a shell environment when so much of the work you have to do doesn’t live in there. And once you start cobbling together tools that might let you live in both worlds, you’re in a UI wild west, with myriad configuration conventions and differing ideas about ergonomics.

It has not been easy on the ego to slowly transition out of that Unix orientation. I have the career I have because of that first account on an Ultrix box and years spent in and out of the Unix and Linux orbit as a writer, sysadmin, web developer, consultant, and manager. It has been almost as much a cultural identity as a skill set, and possibly more.

But it also feels increasingly awkward and shoehorned into my day-to-day life, and clinging to it bothers me because I’m at a stage of life where I want to be less set in my ways, not more. I think about how to maintain my fundamental plasticity as a matter of aging gracefully, remaining a learner, and embracing the ways the culture around me is changing in ways I’m not always chill with, but need to accept.

As hard as it is to set aside or let go of something that was such a big part of my life, though, it’s also nice to lose that sense of obligation to a past self who’s indifferent to my present self.