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.

I can't believe I didn't sign up sooner!

A friend pointed me to Dropbox the other day to transfer PDFs to my iPad. I'm not sure why I didn't sign up earlier. It's free for up to 2 GB and it works so seamlessly. It's actually easier to use than dragging and dropping files across my network; just place the file in the Dropbox folder on one machine and it appears on the other machine almost instantly. It really couldn't be any easier.

I've reviewed their specs and they say it is secure where even their employees can't view files. I haven't read anything to the contrary, but who knows. Will I put my accounting data on it? No. Will I put temp files that I need to move around on it? Sure.

Give it a try and see if it can work for you.

Got Milk?

I lost my iPad (to my son)

The iPad is truly amazing in that anyone can use it with very little direction. I made the mistake of letting my 3 year old son use it. He's now addicted to it; he loves to see pictures and hear the Toy Story Read-Along book.

If I pull out the iPad, all he wants to do is play with it. I almost have to wrestle it out of his hands. Maybe by the time he goes to kindergarten, I'll give him one!

(You can see I'm a bit worried about him dropping my very expensive device.)