This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz
by Christian Neukirchen.
Original Post: What next?
Feed Title: chris blogs: Ruby stuff
Feed URL: http://chneukirchen.org/blog/category/ruby.atom
Feed Description: a weblog by christian neukirchen - Ruby stuff
So what do I want to do next? That’s a bit up in the air at the moment. One of the great things about keeping up with Rails development over the past year has been reading and mulling over the thoughts of all the smart people who are involved in the community.
The biggest thing I’ve taken from that section of my RSS reader is passion. The core rails developers are obviously passionate about what they do. Many of the developers who discovered Rails before it became “famous” found it because they were passionate about web development and always on the lookout for better ways to do their jobs. They promoted it passionately because they saw how good it was which lead to more people using it who in turn are passionate about Rails because it has brought fun back into their jobs. Kathy Sierras Creating Passionate Users blog has lots of good reading about passion too.
Rails makes developing web apps much nicer than it was before, and when I first started playing with it I thought I’d rediscovered my passion for web apps again. I’ve realized now that I was just loving Ruby. Don’t get me wrong, Rails is fantastic, it’s the web apps that I’ve realized I’m not interested in. I don’t want to spend the next part of my life trying to jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon or chasing new clients. I’ve realized I’m not the entrepreneurial type, so I’ll leave that to other people.
So what can I get passionate about?
That’s the big question I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. What could I do that would make me want to get out of bed in the morning? What would I be able to do that I could look back on in ten years time and say I’m glad I did that? I’ve actually been trying to figure out that one for a while and the best one word answer I can come up with is ”green”.
I want to do something that increases our understanding of the worlds environment, I want to be able to look back and see improvements in how we integrate ourselves with the planet we live on. I’ve a lot more thoughts on sustainability and energy use that I’ll probably talk about at a later date. At the moment I’m thinking about how I can take the skills I have and use them to do what I’ve said above.
I don’t think I can do it straight away with my current skills. Just building websites for environmental organizations wouldn’t be enough. I want to get into the science, and I’m thinking the best way to do that could be doing a masters in something to do with Geographical Information Systems (GIS). I’m going to not think about it too much till I get back from my trip and I wouldn’t be able to start a masters till next September anyway. So I’ve plenty of time to consider whether that’s the right way to achieve what I want.
Previous Topic
