When I first started this blog, back in 2018, I was very young. I mean, that was 6 years ago, and I’m not even 30 yet. I was 22 and on a whim I decided that I want to shout my technological shenanigans into the void. I hate the term “personal brand”, but I guess I thought it would boost it, despite feeling like a narcissist buying the domain orelfichman.com.

To be honest, I had no clue what I was doing, WordPress-wise.
This was my first encounter with running an actual website; and every small CSS change required way too much Googling for me to pull off, because hey – I’m not a developer.

I did not study STEM growing up. I majored in theatrical arts and business administration; I was a heavy gamer with zero technical skills, and one day my PC started crashing. Monitoring the temps, I noticed the GPU heats up really quickly and the PC shuts down, and realized the fan no longer spins. What can a frugal teen on a budget do to fix the problem?

The answer is – create this monstrosity. I bought some hard drive cooling racks, disassembled the tiny fans, then took off the GPU’s plastic cover and screwed the tiny fans into the heatsink. You’d be surprised how effective it turned out.

Yes, it’s unsightly, but it’s practical and most importantly – shows initiative.
See, you don’t have to be the best at what you do, and you don’t have to have expensive equipment to fix problems.

Back in the army, I decided I wanted to learn Powershell. I learned from outdated presentations we had laying around since we had no internet connectivity. I look back at the code I wrote back then and to be honest – I cringe. It was crude, illegible, and keep in mind I didn’t even know about the concept of functions. But, this crude code is my origin story – not perfect, sometimes not even good, but full of initiative and a will to do better. This is the key.

Same when I created a Tinder-swiping bot to practice my newly-acquired Python skills (for better or worse, this predated my blog).

Same when I wanted to become a DevOps Engineer and did countless home assignments to have a chance at the Junioriest of jobs.

Same when I made a simple Arduino game, created a Jira issue printer, or dug way too deep into the rabbit hole that is terminal escape codes.

As long as you have initiative, you’re guaranteed to progress in your career; because no matter how boring a task is, you can find a million different ways to do it, and are constantly thinking of ways to improve.

This blog started up as something solely about the technology itself, but as I get older I can’t help but feel compelled to write about the more human side of tech, especially as the AI revolution looms over all of us.

I’ve seen devs with fat resumes and “senior” in their job title who choke when they hit a new problem. They’ve got the years, but they’re stuck. Then you’ve got the randos with barely a GitHub who’ll attack a bug like it owes them money. Those are the ones who ship. Initiative isn’t about being a genius. It’s about being cool with sucking until you don’t.

If you’re sitting there thinking, “I can’t do that project because I’m not qualified,” here’s the deal: you’ll never feel qualified. Just start. Write the code. Ship the site. Break stuff and google the fix. You don’t need a diploma or a LinkedIn full of jargon. You need to care enough to keep going when it’s rough. That’s what got me here, six years into this blog, still ranting about tech to anyone who’ll listen. If a 22-year-old doofus like me can hack it, you’ve got zero excuses.

And this post? It’s a pep talk. More so a self pep talk than anything else. Your passion and initiative might ebb and flow, of course, you can’t give you 100% all the time. However, as long as you show up, as long as you show interest, as long as you keep on thinking the many different ways to approach a problem – you’re on the right track.