28th March 2021 at 21:03

I’ve decided that the @hankchizljaw Twitter account is work-only now and I’ll only use and interact with it during work hours.
I took a little step away last week because I could feel the burnout apathy twinging again, so took swift action to nip it in the bud.

I’ve realised that the lack of separation between work and myself, a human, is killing me. Obviously, being independent, there’s an intrinsic link between personal and my work, which is sorta unavoidable.

This pandemic has taken everything away from us and left only work and trying to battle endless burnout waves during “all of this” is like fighting off an angry bull with a red rag. I’m yearning for some separation of personal and boring internet money, because the lack of it is clearly not helping me.

Coding is cool and I like it, but I’m not like, “passionate” about it. Music is where that passion really lies. Heck, if I hadn’t had to do an important audition at Leeds College of Music while I was still recovering from chronic flu, which had me bed-bound for a month, when I was 17, I wouldn’t even be writing this post lol.

I only got into the web because I could make cool stuff in flash or build out a MySpace profile and get paid for it—what a dream. All this happened after I dropped out of a music production degree which I found really boring. The web then was weird, still pretty new and fun as hell. It resonated with me, a weird, extremely chaotic (at the time) creative.

The web now has gotten extremely corporate and the community: hostile. That hostility has gotten so much worse over the last 12 months and the hostility is related to stuff that really doesn’t matter like opinions on frameworks and whether or not HTML is a programming language (it is you fucking melts). I really enjoy teaching folks how to make websites: I just find myself veering further away from “the industry”.

Anyway, I can’t fucking tweet about anything other than code stuff on @hankchizljaw without some arsehole in my replies, a lot of the time. If I’m really lucky, I get arseholes in my replies about tech too. Frankly, I can’t really be arsed with that shit anymore.

I set up a new Twitter: @piccalilli_. I’m gonna spend more time on there and tweet all the real life stuff.
I will now tweet only tech stuff on @hankchizljaw, like posts on the Piccalilli site and stuff that I like in tech world. Don’t worry, I’ll still shitpost because tech takes itself way too seriously and I like making fun of it.

So yeh, come and hang on @piccalilli_. It’s not private anymore. This blog won’t auto-syndicate to the work account after this post either: it’ll auto-syndicate to my personal account instead.

In an attempt to get some of myself back, I’m now going to obsessively collect vinyl, learn woodworking and cook a lot of pizza. I might even download FL studio and make some below-average electronica again.

Update: this one aged like milk in the sun, LOL


👋 Hello, I’m Andy and I’ll help you build fast & visually stunning websites.

I’m the founder of Set Studio, a creative agency that specialises in building stunning websites that work for everyone. If you’ve got a project in mind, get in touch.


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