As I get older, I recognize that my capacity to contribute meaningful code to librarianship is diminishing. For me, coding was originally a backup plan: a career path that I could pursue if I didn’t get tenure. But it didn’t come to that, thankfully. Also, it turned out that I love coding, and that it has brought me a great deal of joy over the years. But the window of opportunity to transition to a programming role has rapidly closed. The impression I get is that by my age, most coders have become managers and stop writing software as intensively.

Anyhow, I am fine with this. There’s not much I can do about it anyway. The result is that I should probably not continue to put all my eggs in one programming basket, and find something else to do with my time. So recently I’ve been focusing more on “peri-scholarhship”. Going forward, I want to put more of my efforts into supporting librarianship by writing articles, reading them, reviewing them, editing them, working in the publication process, and so on. I know I’m a marginal participant in this world, at best. But my calculation is that with the years I have left in the profession, I’ll be able to make more of a contribution via peri-scholarship than I would by continuing to chase JavaScript libraries.

All this to say that posts to this blog may become less frequent. I hope you’ll stay subscribed to the feed, because I’m not closing down the blog, just shifting the emphasis elsewhere for a bit.

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