A year in the life
I know it seems a bit late for the “New Year’s Resolution” type post but I’m a bit late sometimes!
Over the last year a lot in my life has changed; I’ve graduated from college, got married, worked as a .NET developer and I’m currently working as a technician in a school system. This has lead me to change the way I want to interact with technology in multiple ways and therefore I’ve come to a few conclusions and decisions that I thought I would share:
- I am a progammer
- I love Rails
- I need to stick to my strengths
I worked for a small development company that work only in .NET programming and it made me realize that I LOVE writing code. Before this job I was never quite certain that I wanted to work on coding directly for 40 hours a week but after this I have no doubt. Unfortunately the job itself was not quite the fit I was looking for as it was a desktop programming job and I would prefer to stick to the web side of things and it was also an hour commute…
After working in multiple languages and frameworks all throughout school and since(PHP, Java, Cocoa, C,VB.NET) I have concluded that I prefer Rails overall. It is a wonderfully robust framework and I feel content when I write code in rails. Its not perfect and when it doesn’t fit the job, I’m always willing to use something else, but when it works, I love it!
I can’t be everything to everyone. I’m not a designer. Let me say that again, I AM NOT A DESIGNER! No matter how hard I try, I still do not have the creative requirements for such a position, however, I am good at other things. I personally think I am a great software engineer. I love to spend hours going through my code and fixing every issue and making sure everything works exactly the way a user wants it too. However this doesn’t just apply to things outside of the coding arena, I’ve learned that rather than learning a lit bit of everything I want to concentrate my efforts on a few things. Instead of trying to stay sharp on PHP, Java, Rails and every other language I’ve learned I want to stick to being REALLY good at Rails and for any other type of work I think I’ll be using Drupal.
So what does all this mean? Nothing to most people, but to me it means a lot.. It means that I’ve learned what I want to do in life. I want to work on Rails. I want to spend my hours coding away. For now, I’m going to stick with my technician job because I don’t want to abandon the people I work with after having just joined the team so I’m going to take this time to work on Rails on the side as much as I can and sharpen those skills so that when I do go looking for employment, the person who seems my resume will have no doubt that I’m the perfect candidate.
Wish me luck!