Growing up in the country meant casual jobs were farmhands or anything manual work related. When apple picking season came around, there was always a need for available hands
which meant pocket money! I never thought it would give me analogies for later life. The first instructions when picking from a tree: do a pass and move on.
When picking apples you look for the ripest fruit first — the ones that will perish if not harvested, the ones most ready for market. With a Royal Gala you’re looking for the deepest red. You work your way around the tree in one pass, selecting as you go.
Around 2020 I made a deliberate decision to stop language tourism — spreading effort across Python, Ruby, and PHP — and consolidate around TypeScript. I haven't looked back.
The Context Switch Cost
For several years I was maintaining professional fluency across multiple languages simultaneously. Python for data pipelines and NLP work, Ruby on Rails for server-side applications, PHP surfacing in legacy projects, and JavaScript on the frontend. Each language has its own idioms, standard library conventions, ecosystem tooling, testing patterns, and community norms. I felt more marketable in the hiring game if I could claim expertise across all touchpoints.