Introspection/Extroversion

It’s saturday morning and I’m waiting for the conference to begin. I really like coming to conferences because they get me excited about what I do again, even if it’s just for a little bit. When I was younger, I really liked work. I loved coding and I did it even in my spare time. Now, I’ve almost completely lost that, as I’ve transitioned into a bitter career programmer. I know that there are people that really do well and love it, but I don’t know how to keep that spark. The thing that kind of struck me was two speakers: Bob Lee, from Google, and Justin Gehtland, from… I don’t remember (and I’m writing this offline, so I will need to go look it up later). They both had really interesting talks, and both are fairly young (+/- 5 years of my age, I’d guess) – and they both have tons of accomplishments. Books, architecture, speaking engagements, working for cool companies. I wonder where they find the time, as well as how they keep the interest in what they do. I’m not interested in what I do, most of the time. I don’t have very many stimulating conversations (technical ones, anyways) and I don’t usually have the desire to code or work on tech stuff once I’ve left work. Come to think of it, I don’t have much desire when I’m at work either, but i doubt very much that I’m alone on that one. I think that in the next couple weeks I really need to spend some quality time thinking about what I want to do for a living, long term. (Or more commonly known as ‘When I grow up.’) Because if this is it, then man, it stinks. I want to have the same burning fire and desire to do stuff that I had when i was young. When I would stay up all night hacking on some piece of arbitrary code – for me, not for anyon e else. I remember my first real ‘shipping’ application, now forever lost. It was a character editor for Ultima 4, that I wrote in C and Borland C Builder. It had a nice UI, nice everything. I sometimes wonder what ever happened to it (I’ve lost it a long time ago.) I can remember spending HOURS just hacking the code that read out the characters into the right Struct. (I was fairly new to C at the time) with no documentation. Load the bytes. Twiddle the bytes. Save the bytes. Launch U4. Load the game. examine each character for changes. I can even remember being in College and working on my labs and term projects for fun. Handing in my final project in the first month of the semester. I Enjoyed it. I LOVED it. Now it’s rare that I get really motivated about stuff. I need to find a project that I really need. Something that I really want to take part in, and really start to buckle down and work on it. Spend time coding for FUN. I also have been trying to come up with a book proposal to submit to some usual type people (Addison-Wesley, O’Reilly, etc.) but it is difficult to come up with an idea for a book that doesn’t seem to be done already. To quote HHH: “All the goood themes have been done. Used up, and turned into theme parks.” Of course he next goes on to say something about blindness and blandness and doing crazy shit, but maybe that’s exactly what I need. I guess I’m just not happy at my job. I’m not challenged, I’m not learning too much, and I’m definately not thrilled about the management in general. Until next time, gentle readers: Remember to eat your cereal with a fork, and do your homework in the dark.

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COMMENT
AUTHOR: Rob http://www.robspain.com/blog [Visitor]
DATE: 04/08/2006 04:32:22 PM
Oh yes HHH one of my favorites.
“All the goood themes have been done. Used up, and turned into theme parks.” Maybe a theme park is what we need here. Maybe we just need to get away from the whole mess we call wrok and life for a while. There is an interisting question in this post somewhere I think. What would we do if money didn’t matter and we were left up to our own devices to do what we wanted to do with our day. I know if I was not driven by the need for a paycheck I would do something else with the daylight hours
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I’m in Las Vegas attending a Java Server Symposium and it’s really amazing. The speakers have mostly been really good, and the topics and information has been great as well. I’ve started a list of stuff that I want to look at more, and so far it reads:

Annotations, JSF integration tools Spring, Webworks, SEAM, i18n messages, crazybob.org, Apache’s Maven, RIFE, Hivemind, Cocoon, Shale/Clay, Tapestry, Java Studio Creator 2, JSON, Greasemonkey, JAX 2 and Jax WS, Apollo and Avalon.

And that’s just the first day.

The stuff about AJAX has been the best so far. The first AJAX talk today showed how they could use AJAX, client side only, to implement a very basic Google Maps application in < 200 lines of code. Wow.

More as my brain unwinds.

Oh, and apparently you can gamble here?

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