I know this is totally off-topic for Mozilla, but I find myself wanting to take up a new hobby, carpentry. To spare people who don’t care, the rest of this entry is in the extended entry.

For the last couple of years, I’ve had a desire in the back of my head to do a little bit of woodwork. I can’t put my finger on why, but when I was a little kid, my dad gave me a bookcase that he himself had built when he was many years younger. Last year, I asked him if he and I could just spend some time building something, but we never found the time to start.

Today, I wandered into four different furniture stores, looking for a new computer desk to handle my four computers. When I looked through the catalogs, though, not one of them really impressed me enough for me to say “I’ll take that – here’s a check.” Walking away from the second of those stores, I found myself thinking about the kind of desk I wanted: one where I could slide my chair into the center, and swivel in the chair from workstation to workstation. A circular desk, in other words.

Not many people make circular desks, though, for the general public. Even Google turned up only one manufacturer in the first 100 search results for the phrase “circular desk”. Of course, I can custom-order it, but that’s going to cost a pretty penny.

Instead, if it’s at all feasible, I’d like to simply build it myself, under the guidance of a craftsman. It’d be a spare-time project, and I’d certainly take it more to heart now than I did in eighth-grade shop class.

There’s also the consideration rumbling in the back of my head that I may not be able to do computer work forever. Don’t get me wrong, I still love programming and designing applications – but twenty, thirty years from now, who knows what software engineering will be like? Will I even be able to do it then, or will my skill sets be totally mismatched to the industry in that time frame?

An even better question to ask is “Will I want to do it anymore?” A colleague of mine and friend (whose name many Mozillians would recognize instantly) has decided to get out of software engineering entirely. (No, I’m not talking about Jamie Zawinski and the DNA Lounge. This is much more recent.) Right now, I can’t see why he made that decision, probably because I can’t see why I’d make that decision. I love it too much to even think about leaving right now. But twenty years from now…

The thought of me not doing software engineering actually scares me

. For over twenty five years now, messing with computers and seeing how to make them more useful as tools has been an overriding theme in my life. I’ve even managed to build a career (for the moment) out of it, without spending a day in college. That’s no mean feat in the 21st century, but there may come a day when I can’t – or even worse, don’t want to – do it anymore. If I don’t have another way to support myself, I’ll sink — and I don’t mean just financially.

Oh, I love writing, and a few other things, but none of them really leap out at me as anything that I can currently support a family on. As good as things are now, I really don’t like not having a fallback plan, some other set of useful skills. But to be perfectly and bluntly honest, I don’t have any other trades.

So: Carpentry. I think I could learn that. It might even be fun. Certainly I love the smell of fresh wood.