Hello, I’m Jamie and that’s me above. I am the author here at Trees & Code. This is the back story of how this publication came to be.
TL;DR
(TOO LONG DIDN’T READ)
I left techworld in 2022 to retrain in treeworld. It was meant to a divorce. In late 2024 I realised all I had needed was a break from tech, not a divorce and the fix was two years of treeworld and little-to-no techworld. In late 2024, I was able to rekindle my joy for authoring code whilst retaining my joy of treeworld. Dual career – lucky me.
So, in early 2025 I took a few months of publication silence to organise my universe and resign from day job in education and find a new day job in software. What was originally started off as "Life of Treedom" in 2022 became "Trees and Code" in early 2025.
🌳 Life of Treedom & Trees & Code 🌳 👨💻
Here’s my brief-ish history.
I've been working with the web developing apps and websites since the late 1990s. In the early 2020's I bought a woodland and became very interested in all things tree related. So I saved up some runway money and as a family we agreed a plan for me to take a few years out from techworld in 2022 to retrain in arboriculture, trees and woodland management.
When I took the break the break from tech, it was originally designed to be a permanent move from techworld. I didn't know it at the time but I was burned out. Five years of performing the CTO role had cost my enthusiasm in writing code and so it all felt like me and tech were done. The break was designed to be dramatic move towards a new life, a new career and I so I called the entire venture "Life of Treedom".
The intention was to replace my tech income with an income from a tree / woodland management business as well as the production of woodcraft items. I was going to use this platform as well as the YouTube channel to give people an insight into it all. Easy peasy? Nope – I underestimated three critical points. One, how well paid techworld is. Two, how "modestly" paid treeworld is. Three, how much money it takes to start a business in treeworld. It became clear to me by early 2024 that in order to meet the needs of the family income I'd need a job somewhere. I took a part-time job on "the estate" as a forester two days a week and a teaching job for three days a week at "treeschool". The salary was "modest".
The complexities of having two jobs one thirty miles west of where I lived and one thirty miles south of where I lived was a pain, so in September of 2024 I chose one and went full time. That's how I ended up as a lecturer in trees and woodland management as a full time job. Every teacher in their first year has to go through the brutal trap of spending too much time preparing content. For me, every hour of teaching was taking four hours of preparation. Being paid for a 38 hour week, with 18 hours of lessons and was costing me 70+ hours on preparation. This time was invested from evenings, very late nights, very early mornings and all of my weekends. I was sat a desk pushing pixels and writing words. It was exactly the same as what I was doing in my rather more lucrative role in techworld, only teaching was more work and one-third-ish of the salary.
I was spending no time in the woodland, there was no time for tree jobs. I was sat a desk, I was gaining weight and slipping back into an old pattern of stagnation. The cracks were starting to show and I was starting to admit them to myself, but I wasn’t being completely honest to myself.
Oopsie - but there was a silver lining.
That silver lining was in the form of a gap in the market for good, affordable tree survey, inspection and reporting software. So during the Christmas break of 2024, after promising Mrs Treesandcode I'd do no lesson planning and relax I sat down and did something I'd not done in years. I began writing an app called Dendromeda. I thought it was going to be a pain, but to my amazement all of the joy I had in the early days of writing code (1999-2015) had returned.
So what's an over-worked, underpaid lecturer with two decades of experience in techworld to do with a re-kindled enthusiasm to write code todo?
Trees and code - that's what. Hence, originally started as a "Life of Treedom" became "Trees and Code". Everything pre 1st March 2025 was done so in the context of "Life of Treedom"; everything after that is "Trees and Code".
There's two changes main changes to the content that I write about now. One, I write about code as well as trees. I try to keep the two topics linked, but that's not always possible. Secondly, in the past I have talked about my employers and my day job using aliases such as "The Estate", "Treeschool" or "The Treeservice". As of March 2025, I won't be talking about my day jobs as it isn't relevant. Most of us have day jobs, few of us want them, and we're all just trying to find the joy in life before we die.
For me, that joy is in Trees & Code.
