Tag: career counseling

Don’t miss the beach while you’re on the phone

Summer Staycation is a welcome change

Today marks day three of a few weeks off from work. My wife and I couldn’t synch our time off yet this summer, so we pushed off our plans for a proper vacation later in the year. I needed time away from systems and simulations engineering and a slow down at work opened up the ideal opportunity for extended time away from the office. I’m grateful for the chance to recharge my enthusiasm for both my day job and self assigned side projects. My purely interest driven work has been in limbo since earlier this year except for a few client side CoffeeScript hacks.

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Do you need a vacation if you love what you do? 

Having only experienced the faintest glimmers of loving my profession (rare moments at my day job), the signals for a vacation are slow to build but unavoidable. It begins with a mild form of wanderlust, distractive thoughts which dance at the edge of my conscious attention. If ignored for a few weeks or months, the feeling progresses into a malaise that cannot be shaken with my standard instruments of exercise and rest. 

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Developers at odds with Tech Recruiters

“The job of the smart business person isn’t to fish in waters where coders are cheap. It’s to have enough initiative and vision that the best coders in the world will realize that they’ll do better with you than without you.” – Seth Godin

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The Ephemeral Kiss of Fame

Fame is a seductive mistress, even a small taste brings us begging back for more. Merely being well known among a few social circles is emotionally satisfying, yet there is an archetype that craves attention above all else.

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Everything’s easy until you have to do it

It looked trivial in the beginning, everything does before you actually begin work. You pragmatically promised a cautious feature set, fitting the work to the project timeline and costs. I wish it was the norm, but it’s rare to see a hungry builder walk away from an underfunded project.

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Commuting Costs

This one’s free:

x+y = y+x

This one’s not:

  1. wake up a couple of hours earlier
  2. skip morning exercise
  3. race from car, to train or plane
  4. arrive at a hopefully fantastic company, doing work you love
  5. work late at said epic job
  6. long trip home, dequeueing planes, trains and automobiles
  7. say hi to spouse, wave at unconscious kids before passing out
  8. go to 1

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Your finest work

Last night while poking through my feed reader I happened upon Cranking by Merlin Mann. I discovered Merlin’s work through twitter a couple of years ago, where he immediately became “that guy who tweets like a poetic gunslinger”.

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