If you’re fortunate, there are things you like about your job when you’re working full time. Teachers hopefully want to teach kids. Doctors, to help heal people. Pilots, to fly planes.
But you rarely get to do only those tasks in the modern American workplace. There are often lots of other things. Like meetings. Demands from management. Constant pressure to do more with less.
Retirement gets rid of those workplace negatives. But if you enjoyed the core functions of your job, such as teaching, it makes sense to mull whether you want to still do those things in another way.
Some articles I’ve read about retirement view this as retirees getting bored, or seeking “purpose” in their lives that they lost along with their full-time jobs.
Well, maybe.
But I think it may also be something simpler: People want to keep doing some things they liked about working while jettisoning the things they didn’t – with the big retirement bonus of having more time to do other things, too.
Some careers make that easier than others. There are probably a lot more ways to teach part-time in your community than, say, run a hedge fund. But there still can be ways to translate skills you liked to use at work into new activities.
In my case, it’s been pretty easy. I loved news reporting, feature writing, programming, and working with data during my career. Had I retired 50 years ago, I’d probably mostly be journaling for myself and awaiting the personal computer revolution.
Now, though, anyone can be publish online – as long as you don’t care about having a big audience. I run a couple of blogs: a neighborhood news blog, which I started well before retirement, and my newer retirement blog.
And, I’ve been able to freelance for my former employer, where there actually are people reading.
In addition, not only do I have a home computer that’s orders of magnitude more powerful than what powered Apollo flights to the moon, but AI chatbots that can coach me on projects I want to code.
It’s a great time to be a retired data nerd!
I started my first major career-adjacent hobby news data project last month. It’s related to one of the things I loved early in my career as a newspaper reporter: local election news.
The spark came after seeing a presentation about how the state of Idaho revamped its election-results website with two technologies I already use: the Quarto tech publishing platform, which powers my blogs; and the R programming language, which I love using.
Presenter Andrew Heiss from the University of Georgia, who worked as a consultant on the project, even published some computer code with Gabe Osterhout at the Idaho Secretary of State’s office. It’s similar to that used for the Idaho election site that anyone could look at and modify!
Hmmmm.
Wouldn’t it be cool to do something similar for election results in my little city? For the two dozen or so people who might actually check my blog to see the results? 🤣
I can’t imagine being able to do something like that if I was working full time. I spent several weeks learning about a new workflow R package called targets, asking chatbots to help me understand Heiss’s sample code, and then working with a couple of chatbots to implement a version of it for my blog.
The idea is I’ll publish results as interactive tables and maps for every contested race and precinct in Framingham. And if I’m able to get partial results (that’s the plan), I’ll have an easy way to post those by running a couple of scripts.
It was energizing, low stakes, and fun. Quite unlike the Idaho project that needed to work on Election Day.
I’ll see Tuesday night (or maybe Wednesday morning, depending on how late things go) if it all actually works. If it does, I think it will be a useful community resource. If it doesn’t, well, I’ll be very disappointed. But at least I had fun putting together the prototype and learned some things! And, since this is a solo hobby retirement project: I don’t have to worry that I let anyone down.
Nerd Notes
For anyone interested in the technical details of my local election results project:
The District2Framingham.com blog uses the Quarto publishing publishing system and is hosted by Netlify.
I am using the R programming language for creating tables and maps.
Here is Andrew Heiss’s DIY Election Desk sample code on GitHub. using the targets R package.
I’m using the new mapgl R package for maps; and ggplot2, janitor, dplyr, googlesheets4, sf, DT, tinytable, and other packages for data wrangling and display.
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