guest@monty.sh:/public$ cat /home/monty/about

Welcome to my personal blog, where I write about computers and operating systems and weird stuff that may or may not fit into the previous two categories.

I’m an avid fan of Tabletop Gaming, RISC-V, and taking things apart with screwdrivers and pry-bars, all of which I’m liable to write quite a lot about on my blog. I have a degree in Software Engineering that I wield for both good (writing useful software) and evil (making computers do strange things). I also enjoy writing short stories, primarily sci-fi, which you can read by clicking the link on the navigation menu above.

All the opinions expressed on this site are mine and mine alone, and do not reflect the opinions of any of my employers past or present.

guest@monty.sh:/public/posts$ f="The Eternal Skill Quest"; "date -r $f -u +"%Y-%m-%d" && cat $f

A few days ago, I was chatting with a friend online. Well, more so yearning at their general digital direction about how I felt like making things but didn’t have the executive function to do so.

<Me>: Mmm, my brain wants to make things again

<Them>: sooOOOOoooo make things!

Naturally, I began to explain how the yearning wasn’t matching up to my energy at the time, and how in order to create the things I want to make it takes a sustained effort over a period of time… and this was their response:

<Them>: Oh you don’t mean “I want to make a thing right now” you mean “I want to embark upon a thingmaking Quest”

We spoke a bit more on the topic, and then drifted off to other things, as all good conversations do. But that quote stuck with me, and I suppose that’s because it’s true. A “quest” has some weight to it, not some silly dalliance which produces some creative work by happenstance. But often, one leads to another, and even in many cases I’ve found that motivation often requires the latter to come before the former. That is, I can’t embark on a quest to Create if I’m not willing to Play in that same creative space. It’s an adage I’ve come to know well, even if I’m not always the best at putting it into practice.

At the time, I filed it away with about that much thought and thought nothing else of it… until it came back! I realized, during that night’s usual self-reflections, that my friend had unknowingly crystallized one of the big problems I’d been having in my own personal creative developments!

“I want to make a thing right now”, versus “I want to embark on a thingmaking Quest”. The truth is, I want to do both! I so badly wish I could make things on the spot - draw that illustration in a few hours from imagination, write that useful utility program in an evening, or write that short story in a couple mornings. Yet, so often I don’t have the right combination of skills to make those specific things I yearn for right now. Nearly everything has to be a Thing-Making Quest due to my lack of experience in those creative fields, and the only way I get enough experience points to be able to make things in the now is by undergoing those longer quests.

Knowledge in general, I’ve found, experiences this sort of compounding process in my mind as I learn and improve my skills — it’s almost as if I accrue interest on my efforts! The more I go into an endeavor knowing, the more I’m able to do, both in the sense of work per unit time and project scope alike. Not only that, but if I go in with the right mindset, I actually end up learning more the more I go in knowing. While this all might seem natural — “duh, of course the more you know the more you can do!” — it sheds great light as to why that feeling of never being able to make what you like fast enough never really goes away! As your skills grow, your perception of the problem space sharpens, and what used to be a monolith of tasks and components to the beginner is compounded into a “module” of knowledge that can often times be trivial for the expert.

The process, actually, mirrors the sort of “chunking” that goes on in the game Factorio. For those who might not know, Factorio is a game about being stranded on a hostile alien planet, forced to spin up sprawling factories from nothing in hopes of researching, and then eventually building a rocket to get back home:

This is a very basic example, of course. If that looks intimidating, don’t worry! Factories can get much, much more complex than that. Here’s a snippet of just one piece of a much larger base:

How do players manage that!? Surely, the complexity must be staggering, and anyone would lose the ability to contain the state of what’s going on in their heads. It must be excruciating breaking down these massive complex factory chains into their constituent components every time a new product is needed…

That clearly doesn’t happen, though! Many, many players have beaten the game, and in a great many ways! How do they do it? Experienced programmers might be anticipating what I’m getting at: Their knowledge isn’t simply grown but chunked. It’s abstracted, modularized away. At some point in their game, a skilled Factorio player will stop thinking about individual constructor buildings and start thinking on the scale of entire assembly lines. Programmers do the same thing: after a certain point, the core of a program is abstracted away, you stop thinking of things like http methods and start thinking in terms of the api calls built atop them. The crux of this is that these chunked-up units of knowledge no longer become aggregates of knowledge, but become brand new “primitive” building blocks from which new things can be built.

It’s these “new primitives” that both accelerate our making and also expand our horizons. Now, what used to be a laborious manual process comes as easy as breathing. That factory you built becomes just one module, copy-pasted a hundred times over to support even more complex production. That API you built on top of HTTP and Postgres becomes the cornerstone of your newest SaaS offering. By the same token, though, they also make our ambitions greater, by virtue of expanding the accessible universe: if we can now cross an expanse in a single step that used to take a week to traverse, why not see how far that same week will get us with our new skills?

Of course, the devil lies in the details, there. You always need to spend that week crawling before you can run, and laying in that dirt is such a bitter feeling for one who dreams of running.

I’m my own perfect case study, really. I’ve been programming computers non-stop since I was little — four or five years old, depending on whose account you hear — so my idea of what’s realistically achievable for myself lies in the realm of feature-complete chat clients, operating system kernels, and abhorrent Vulkan compute shaders that do unholy things with GPUs. Some things that I’d like to do, like high performance game engine work and real-time neural network integration, remain daunting not because they are inherently beyond my grasp, but because I simply haven’t compounded the necessary primitive blocks to build into those areas.

To continue down the spectrum, I’ve been writing since I was a teenager — a respectable amount of time, for sure, but it’s still ten-odd years behind my programming skills. Once, the prospect of writing a series felt daunting, so I stuck to short stories. Two thousand words felt long. Now, I struggle to stay under five thousand, and I’m close to fifteen chapters into my first regularly published web serial. Writing a full novel, let alone a series, still feels out of reach, but perhaps not for long; concepts of pacing, descriptive vocabulary, and long-term plot development used to require so much effort and planning to track and implement… and now? It may not be second nature, but now the ideas flow onto the page much more easily, manifesting their strands into neater threads that feel simpler only because I’ve wrought them a thousand times before.

Even further down the line is my artistic skill. I’ve been practicing digital art for the last five years, which has involved daily practice, self-guided online research, and most recently even a multiple year-long commitment to a digital art course. After so long, it still feels crushing to be unable to grasp foreshortening, to see the fabrics I draw so stiff and papery, and all my faces misshapen and off-kilter. Yet, when I look back at my first drawings, I can still see the chunking process at work: my circles are more consistent, my line weights vary as they should without needing conscious direction, and I’m no longer quite so scared of drawing hands!

All of these different stages reveal common threads — each new layer of abstraction I conquer reveals another stratum of complexity beneath, an impossibly wide fractal horizon of skills to master. Yet, this is the paradox of growth: the better I become, the more I see how much better I could be. The modules I’ve built, the primitives I take for granted, are someone else’s mountain to climb. And somewhere, in the back of my mind, that wide-eyed kid who just wanted to make the computer go “beep” is still there, equal parts thrilled and terrified by how far there is left to go.

The compounding never stops. What once felt like mastery becomes a stepping stone. The factory of your mind grows ever larger, ever more efficient, but the blueprint for what’s possible stretches infinitely outward. And so, the itch to create faster, grander, more elegantly never fades — because the horizon of your capability isn’t static. It evolves as you do. The curse and the gift of chunked knowledge is that it turns ceilings into floors, and suddenly, the sky isn’t the limit anymore — it’s the scaffolding.

So where does that leave us, caught between the hunger to create right now and the reality of endless growth? Staring at that distant horizon, I often feel paralyzed as I mistake the infinite for the impossible. But that’s the secret buried in every Thing-Making Quest: the act of chunking itself is a kind of alchemy. It transforms the weight of “I don’t know how” into the thrill of “What if I tried?”

Take my art, for example. Five years ago, sketching a human figure felt like solving a calculus problem with a broken pencil. Today, I still fumble with proportions, and drawing my own comics and animations might still be a far-off goal, but I’ve internalized enough anatomy to play — to exaggerate poses, to experiment with styles. Those early, grueling hours of studying bone structure didn’t just teach me how to draw a ribcage; they gave me permission to break it. Similarly, in programming, the hours I spent debugging memory leaks as a teen weren’t just about fixing code — they forged a mental toolkit for dissecting complex systems. Now, when I tackle a new project, I’m not starting from zero; I’m standing on a pyramid of prior meltdowns and eureka moments.

This is the quiet magic of Skill Quests: they’re not just about stacking knowledge, but about cultivating a kind of creative momentum. Every hour spent grinding away at a skill deposits a little compound interest into your future self’s account. And while the balance might feel invisible today, there will come a moment — a month, a year, a decade from now — when you’ll glance back and realize you’ve crossed a threshold without ever realizing it. The thing that once demanded a Herculean effort now takes a shrug. You’ll have chunked it. Archived it. Turned it into a module you can slot into bigger, wilder builds.

But how do you keep going when the horizon keeps receding? How do you avoid burnout in the face of infinite growth? For me, the answer lies in reframing the Quest itself. It’s not about reaching some mythical endpoint where you’re “ready” to create — in fact, everything I said I wasn’t ready to do above is probably all stuff I should be trying anyway — it’s about treating the journey as the art. Every sketch, every scrapped prototype, every half-baked poem is both a stepping stone and a destination. It’s beyond important, critical even, to celebrate the spaghetti-code factories of my life — the messy, inefficient projects that taught me more than any polished outcome ever could. They’re proof I showed up. That I engaged with the process, even when the end product was laughable.

So yes, the horizon will always stretch. The modules will grow more complex. But with every Quest, you’re not just building skills — you’re building agency. The freedom to glance at a blank canvas or an empty code editor and think, “I could surprise myself today.” And maybe, on a good day, you’ll even manage to surprise the horizon too.

After all, isn’t that what you do in Factorio? You don’t beat the game by staring at the recipe for the rocket silo on day one. You start with a single miner. A furnace. A belt. You build, rebuild, and occasionally set everything on fire. But bit by bit, chunk by chunk, you automate the grind — until what once took sweat becomes a background process. And suddenly, the impossible is just another resource to optimize.

The factory grows. So do we.