Observations
2011 closed out a crazy year, with a lot going on, a lot accomplished and learned, and a lot of questions looking forward into the future. The first decade of the millennium blew by fast, hard and furious, leaving my head spinning. As a software developer who weathered the Great Internet Bubble, and the subsequent crash, I spent a major portion of that time just trying to survive. The economy tanked not once, but twice, jobs were decimated and there just didn’t seem to be a lot of solid ground to gain traction on. The bad taste of internet startups was still in lingering while I was trying to figure out an angle to play that would leverage my software development experience and could be monetized. This was, after all, the decade of passive, fire-and-forget income and tons of people were getting rich off of various online monetization schemes, right? I don’t think so…
That’s what they all wanted you to believe, and by they I mean internet marketers who built a business off of selling tools to other would-be internet marketers who would turn around and try and repeat the same formula. It was a marketplace saturated with tools that were targeted at more hungry internet marketers—selling tools just to sell more tools, and at some point this had to reach a stopping point. Well, it did for me, at least. I looked at all of these tools just to scratch my head and think to myself, “I can build this myself…” But when I stepped back and looked at what all of this was, I just couldn’t get myself to see where the substance was, or how it could be sustained.
I also realized that it is not about the tools or some magic formula, rather it’s about recognizing a need, a pain point, an itch that needs to be scratched, and providing an answer, a solution to a problem—scratching that itch. I also realized that it’s about being passionate about what you are doing. This can be difficult when the driving motivation for many is money to fill in the gaps. This type of rationale is a carrot on a stick that you chase but can’t grab, clouding decision making and the passion that really should be driving. On top of that, when money is short, guilt trumps passion, telling us that pouring yourself into the thing that you love is unwise—you shouldn’t be enjoying yourself when you should be “working”…as if work is some sort of penance and should not be enjoyable.
This is crazy, and I have come across more than enough examples of why one should be focusing on those things we love. For me, I love what I do. I have found it difficult to explain to others close to and around me about the importance of developing free open source software and a developer’s career. Most people get stuck on the free—as in beer—part, saying that if there’s no money in it, then one has no business being involved in it…as if it were a luxury, fun, frivolous. In today’s world, the economy, the job markets and even more so how we live in general has made the traditional beliefs about work not simply obsolete, but even dangerous.
Roadmap
So, I need a plan, a map. I know what my 2 main passions are: Writing and creating…
Software
Just a quick preface—this blog has been around for a few years now, but I have not been very consistent in keeping it up. I have had several posts which in a nutshell said that changes were coming, that a new focus was identified, blah, blah, blah…This is not really one of those posts, at least not for anyone but me ;-) This means that I am going to start working on building some habits, one being consistent writing, capturing my technical experiences—both for my own documentation as well as to share with anyone who may benefit from those experiences. This is my technical outlet. I need a lot of polishing when it comes to putting together blog posts on technical/development topics, but that will come with time.
That said, here is my current list of software development items to learn and/or focus on:
- Audio software development (plug-ins, VST, etc…)
- web development
- open source participation
- Functional programming
- Behavior Driven Development
- mobile development
- software development lifecycle
- build and deployment automation, continuous integration, continuous deployment
- languages to learn or move past basic familiarity
- F#, Haskell — Functional languages
- Ruby/Rails
- Javascript
- Python
- HTML5/CSS3
- PHP
- Powershell
Tools
- Entity Framework 4
- NoSQL database development
- Functional programming
- ChuckNorris Frameworks
- SpecFlow
- Appcelerator Titanium
- Mono Touch/Mono for Android
- Mono Framework
- ASP.NET MVC 4
- SignalR
- Git
This is just a list of things right off the top of my head that fuel my intense interest, and at times to the point of distraction ;-) I know I can’t do everything at once, but this is the start of my skills development backlog. There will definitely be more…
Music
I was born a musician. I spent most of the first 20 years of my life completely and utterly dedicated—holed up even—to practicing, performing and perfecting my musicianship. Classically trained, I studied cello and shared that passion with the guitar. That was my life, and I couldn’t see any other direction for my life. Toward the end of high school, my grandmother told me, “music is a great avocation, just not a very good vocation…” That stuck with me. There was some truth in that statement, and while I do wonder what things would be like if I had really made a go of making music my profession, I see where I am at now and my career choices have put me in a very cool position…music and technology have always walked hand-in-hand and are now inextricably blended in such a way that my 2 passions can be combined. Seeing as this is my technical outlet, I won’t get into the music details, but will be posting them on my music and audio technology focused site that you can see here.
However, I will be writing about audio software and development technologies as they relate to projects I am working on or come across. This has been a huge interest of mine since before I even saw it feasible to get involved in this type of software creation, and with the proliferation of technology and innovation, and the application of Moore’s Law to the audio technology segment, I finally see an opportunity to jump in and apply my professional skills to this other passion. I am really excited about these possibilities and how things come around, giving me an opportunity to come full circle and have the 2 passionate interests of mine form a synergy that is yet to be discovered.
End Game
I honestly believe that it is in having passions like these, regardless of how popular or seemingly trivial, that fuels innovation, creativity and our will to live and grow. It is this type of passion that produces quality, things of value, and it is things of value that ultimately provide a living for us and puts food on the table. This is life. There are so many out there, I would even argue a likely majority, that not only do not love what they do, but can’t stand what they do, and given a choice, would choose something else. I love what I do, but not necessarily where I am doing it, which is why I need a map in order to bring what I do in line with where I do it—not simply for a short-term fix, but rather a life-changing mindset that will be something entirely new—and better, not simply the same thing in a different place.
What is it that you would choose, given the chance, as a career differently that what you are doing, or where you are doing it now?
