rekindled
I am going to write about rekindling my passion for programming. Working for go nowhere corporate giants for the past eight years really sucked the life out of me. It left me with a fat wallet but no passion. When I worked for startups, I had a passion for writing code. I miss the days when I’d work until I was so exhausted I would take a nap under my desk at 4am. I hope to take a sabbatical over the next six months to reignite my passion. My wallet will get thinner but my passion for coding will be renewed. I have Startup Weekend Boulder 2009 partially to thank for this. It was during this weekend where I rediscovered what it is that I am passionate about. I’ve always been happiest in my career when I’ve learned new technology. I am going to learn lots of new technology.
I wrote my first program as an 8 year old in 1980 after my dad gave me my first computer. It was the Commodore Vic 20. The 20 stood for 20kilobytes of RAM. My new MacBook Pro has 2,000,000 times more RAM. I saved my first program to a cassette tape. I felt so powerful with my little 10 line basic program. It wasn’t until 1990 that I truly fell in love with programming using Turbo Pascal 5.5. I loved it because it was Object Oriented and I just “got it”. In 1995 I became obsessed with the thought that I could put web pages on the school network and anybody in the world could see them. In 1996, I learned Perl so I could write my first CGI programs. I did this while I was supposed to be learning scheme I think. In 1999, I fell in love with Java because it made programming for the Internet easy and object oriented. In 2003 I learned C# because it was like java but you could write Windows apps. In every single one of these situations, I learned the language just for the love of coding.
I met some passionate coders at the Startup Weekend in Boulder. I went hoping to meet people who love technology and I was not disappointed. There were lots of folks with passion. Corey Donohoe especially reminded me of the passion I used to have. Since I’m most passionate when I’m learning new things, I’ve decided to learn a new (to me) operating system, new (to me) programming languages, and I’ll even use technologies I previously thought were kinda dumb (twitter, facebook, etc). During the weekend we were also encouraged to start a blog by Startup Weekend founder, Andrew Hyde . I’ve toyed with the idea a while, but didn’t really think I had anything worth while to contribute. Even if what I write has been written somewhere else, at the very least, I will be another entry that will show up in google when other people have problems with code. Maybe a different perspective on the same solution will help others out.
This will basically chronical my experience as primarily a Windows/Java/C# developer learning all things Mac/Ruby/iPhone. I’m learning how to use a Mac because they are just so darn pretty. Well, the real reason is because I want to do mobile development. Mobile development reminds me of 1995 when I first discovered the web. And the king of all mobile devices is the iPhone. Also, I can do blackberry and gphone apps on my Mac using Java. I can even do windows mobile if I install Windows in a virtual machine on my Mac. So logically it just makes sense to own a Mac. Plus, I think the OS is a work of art and it’s past time I learn it. I want to learn Ruby primarily because the folks I noticed that were most passionate were Ruby coders. The Ruby website excites me when I read things like: “Its fans call it a beautiful, artful language.” The Ruby on Rails website excites me with these statements: “optimized for developer happiness” and “lets you write beautiful code”. I can’t wait to get started.