Doing what you love to do

When I was in college, I had no idea what I was going to do. I was in a general engineering program at Harvey Mudd College which was going to prepare me to be a "general engineer". Would a company hire me when I didn't have a speciality? I had no idea and really didn't think about it much. During the winter break of my junior year, I wrote a program called NotifyMail which you could consider "push notification" to alert me of new email. Way back then I was addicted to email and wanted to know instantly when I had email. This was the turning point in defining my career.

For the next 14 years, I wrote a lot of software. I wrote so much code that engineers called me "Dash" from the Incredibles! I lost track of the number of products I worked on, but do have a collection of product boxes and brochures on shelves in my office. 18 months ago, I was tired of writing code, so I accepted my current position where I'd write very little, if any, code, but would do more R&D as well as run IT for a small company.

In my spare time for the last 6 months or so, I've been working on a coding project that really got me to think about what I love to do. It turns out that I love to write code. There is something about the challenge of writing code as well as the freedom in writing code that really keeps me going. Sometimes I get obsessed with writing code so much that I can't sleep trying to solve a problem. Also, being able to say "yeah, I wrote that" and getting feedback from users is pretty cool.

After much personal reflection, I came to the conclusion that I needed to go back to writing code and get out of the world of IT. Last week I tendered my resignation and I'll soon be self-employed again doing contract software development focusing on Macintosh and iPhone/iPad applications. This change, of course, does not come lightly, but I believe it is the right move.

If you have a need for a highly talented (and modest :-)) software engineer, please let me know.