There is a lot of talk about change all around us. It is that kind of a season in the world. Political change. Climate change. Technical change. Things progressing and regressing all the time. Life coaches and inspirational speakers will often tell you that it is those who are best at weathering the changes in their lives who will thrive. The serenity prayer suggests we should ask for the courage to change that which we can, and the wisdom and serenity to accept that which we cannot. So, how do we actually look at all this change, and avoid the seeming chaos around us?
Technical Change
One of the easiest aspects of this to talk about is the ever changing technical sphere. From learning Delphi in 2008 to writing AI assisted code in 2025, the world of technology is not even close to the same place. I’ve seen a lot of fear mongering, pooh-poohing, and other nonsense around AI assisted coding and so called “vibe coding”. I have been one of the people who looked at new tools and was proved wrong when I said “well that’s a bubble which will pop”. I have also instigated changes from manual scripting and doing everything from the ground up, to using tools designed to make that job easier.
At no point have I feared that my skills would become redundant. Part of that is because the world of technology has been changing at a rapid pace for most of my life. In this sphere I am used to the fact that I am a curmudgeonly troglodyte who yells at kids to keep off my lawn. I am not an early adopter of technical change, but that does not mean I will never be influenced by it. When generative AI broke into the tech scene, and took the world by storm, I was sceptical. I agreed with all the people who were up in arms about it not being used responsibly, and I still have concerns about the data aspects of it. The privacy aspects of it. I also could see that it was very immature, prone to hallucination, and not yet ready for the amount of hype it was being given.
Now, after the technology has cooled down a little, and we can start to see it maturing into well formed market segments, I am starting to use it. That is also because the particular piece of work I am involved with requires it, but more on that piece of change later. When you work on the bleeding edge of technology, you find all the sharp edges and gotchas. You may be moving things forward and innovating, but you are also taking bigger risks, and setting yourself up for a little more work in the long term regarding maintenance. There is a space for that, but there is also a space for those of us who only believe in using the stable LTS release of a piece of software. The latest one, yes, but one which we can rely on for multiple years. I compare AI assisted coding to the introduction of IDEs and intelli-sense. The VIM/emacs purists out in the world are still avoiding the IDE. They have bindings and flags and tags and whatever else which mean they can write code as fast as they want to. The rest of us, may still have VIM bindings in the muscle memory of our fingers, and might be more comfortable with markdown formatting than whatever you call the formatting from Word or Docs, but we like the integrated assistance of the software reading the class we are using and giving us a list of methods we might want. AI assistants are taking that a step further, and adding snippets of code (I find them over-eager but still interesting). If you want another view on this, Martin Fowler’s Memos are an insightful deep diver.
So, much like keeping up with the introduction of golang and rust rather than building everything in C and C++, there is scope to accept that AI assistants are pretty good at writing configuration files and boilerplate code. They need a lot of hand holding to implement more complex cases correctly, and they lose context more easily than I’d like. I can use them, but not for everything. Finding that nuance is a big part of weathering change appropriately.
Personal Change
I said technical change was the easy aspect of this. The difficult part, but in many ways the more important part, is weathering personal change. Change is inevitable, how we handle it is what sets us up for success or misery.
One of the big ways in which our personal lives change, is when things interrupt our carefully crafted and optimised routines. Part of the reason it has taken so long to recover those routines after COVID is the slowness with which they are settling down. Most of us have a specific date in mind, in March of 2020, when our daily routine got chucked in the bin. When we stopped our daily commute, found ourselves stuck in a makeshift home office, and lost track of reality for a time. In many ways recovering from that drastic change was easier than what came next. We had a sense of global community as the entire world, all our social media, all our family, understood that routine had just been upset. We stood in solidarity with those who lost their jobs, and we found ways for those who were bored to keep themselves busy. I’ll admit to feeling a bit of envy for those who had the time to pick up new hobbies.
The routine changed. We set up permanent home offices (those of us who could), and restrictions slowly opened up allowing people to return to work. Some routines could recover quickly, others are still recovering. That is why I suggest the post-COVID routine change is so much harder. We spent time, money, and energy on making sure we could manage in an introverted and remote world. We started new hobbies to stay healthy, picked up exercise routines. Changed the way we work. Then people wanted us to begin changing again. This is where the in-office or fully-remote arguments start shaping up. Pre-COVID I didn’t think twice about the fact that I would commute to an office every day. I also refused, point blank, to take meetings and calls at home. Now, I work remotely and have to work a lot harder (or be more explicit) to ensure that no one expects me to be on a call at 5pm.
One of the things I wrote about a couple of weeks ago was spending time re-prioritising my life. This was, for me, a very important aspect of weathering change. I had decided I was done with big-corporate, and wanted to reset my life. For the first while, I just “recovered”. I wasn’t going out much, at one point I felt like I only really left home for Church and Therapy. One of the things I had to do, was to figure out where my priorities lay for myself. I felt like I had lost something important, and it was in finding those things and making them a priority again, that I could re-energise myself.I had the time and space to shape a routine any way I wanted. I may not have got it perfect, but it was working. Once I reached that point, I could see that I needed the structure of “a job” back in my life, and that was when the hunt began.
I mentioned not having found a permanent position. That doesn’t mean not working, it means adjusting my view on what is available to me. Taking a contract position on a project which I believe will be an overall good thing to have done, with people who are willing to play a supportive role, is proving a good decision. However, rejoining this structured lifestyle means another round of adapting to change. It took having an 8am goal setting session scheduled for me to realise just how “central” 8am is to my morning routine (the roads are quieter, making running and dog walking easier). So, I have to re-jiggle things so that I can maintain the pieces which I need to maintain, but also be part of the community I need to be able to thrive. On the other hand, by having a remote, flex-time position, I can happily still go out for coffee with someone, or spend an hour at the Church on Thursday to prepare the music for Sunday. I am not beholden to someone else’s clock or idea of how my brain should work.
Where We End Up
Much like adopting new practises in tech, I have to adopt new routines into my personal life. I do apply the same concept of experimentation. I am even allowing that different days will follow different routines (I don’t run every morning…). I allow myself the grace to mess it up while I’m figuring it out, but come back to the important pieces when I can. Acknowledging that maybe skipping the ten minute meditation session I’ve been trying to maintain around lunch time is not the best way to fit more time into my day, and looking for something else that can give instead.
I don’t think I manage change perfectly. I do think having a handle on it, acknowledging that it is hard and stressful, and then giving myself the grace to stuff it up from time to time is much healthier than some of my previous attempts to cope. So long as I don’t end up eating peanut butter with a spoon whilst sitting on the couch in my pyjamas at noon, I’ll count it as a win. By surrounding myself with the right structure and support group, I am no where near that point, and I can celebrate it in quiet ways.
Pippa Hillebrand 