For the longest time, getting asked 'So, what do you do?' would stop me in my tracks.
Nowadays, my go-to response is to make the somewhat obscure statement of, "I write, but who I write to is not a person."
It is somewhat obscure, but yet cuts closer to the core of what I do than the alternative description of "I work as an engineer in the software industry," because at heart I do view the act of writing code into an IDE as a form of communication, and the recipient just so happens to be a computer.
My initiation into the world of web development started out in 2017, from a side quest of wanting to create a personal blog without having to pay anyone any money. That's not entirely true, I did pay $20 to Jonas Schmedmann on Udemy, and poured many, many hours into learning from him and doing the work to upload my janky HTML, CSS and JS files up into Netlify which ultimately led to the birth of https://juliangoh.me.
Since then, two wonderful side effects emerged for me:
Writing as a habit that is deeply embedded into the way that I think through old simmering questions and process new inputs.
In 2022, leapfrogging from my past life as a chemical engineer working in the heavy manufacturing industry to my current life today working as a software engineer in the technology industry.
I enjoy spending the rest of my time... collecting obscure quotes from the things I read, tinkering with old Japanese cars, shooting street photography, running 42.4 km in 3:15:21 and listening obsessively to people express themselves and say what they have to say.