Yearning to Simplify

This may sound like a cliché, but ever since my son was born nine short months ago, my priorities have shifted into sharp focus. It helps that I read a book called "Living Simply with Children" that in turn led me to read "Your Money or Your Life." I find that I don't care about surrounding myself with stuff I bought. We moved to a smaller, less expensive town. My wife quit her job because we consider it more important for her to be a full time parent than a full time marketing writer. And this aesthetic is beginning to show itself in my work. I'm getting sick of stack traces forty calls deep. The Java world is rife with complexity. There's a ton of great work out there, but once you've incorporated all the cool stuff into your app, you find you're dependent on twenty libraries which are each dependent on twenty libraries and so on. I love the elegant simplicity of Ruby on Rails. I love the ethic of Unix tools: do one thing well. I love the clean lines of a well-made OS X application. All this compels me to cut the crap out of my life. Maybe plant a garden.