Bruce Wayne gets paid
Still reading? Thanks. I’ll try to keep it short. I was born with the hacker mentality; i.e. a strong desire to understand exactly how things around me work. If you’re uncomfortable with the word “hacker” let me start off by saying you should just stop reading now.
I was recruited by Microsoft when I was 19 at a McGill University job fair. I didn’t think I had a snowflakes chance in hell, but I went to the interview anyway. I also had some reservations about working for “the man,” but when you’re 19 with no job prospects you’d be surprised how quickly one changes their mind. I got the job, and my “career” began although I didn’t look at it that way. I worked at Microsoft that summer and I ended up going back to Microsoft the following year to work on WPF (then “Avalon”).
By this point, I was also already using Rails 1.1 in my spare time to hack together some projects on the side. I was writing .NET during the day and so bored with it that I would come home and tinker with other stuff. This is what I mean when I talk about Bruce Wayne by day and Batman by night. Bruce Wayne has to pay for Batman’s exploits. If Wayne Industries were to fail, so would Batman. I had found something that paid well and supported my lifestyle. The rest of my career is relatively mundane so I won’t bore you with all the specifics. It’s pretty standard stuff for any motivated code monkey. Work to live, not live to work.
Batman kicks ass
Throughout this time though, I was consistently not satisfied with the work I was getting. It was challenging in a “how fast can you type” kind of way, but it didn’t get me up in the morning. What it did do though was pay my fucking bills, which if you’ve never lived in Manhattan are not cheap. But living in Manhattan is home to me: I was born here and I’ll probably die here so moving out was not an option.
So I kept hacking at night: coding, contributing when I could, and getting as much diversity as I could in the philosophy and approach employed by various languages, communities, and frameworks. It was exciting to me just to see what was out there.
Getting to the point, being Batman full-time
I was still programming; I kept working and pushing open source technologies in my own professional work. As time went on, I kept getting the same feeling that I needed to kick ass full-time. The money was good, but I realized that I needed to move on. So I quit my job and I’m pursuing my ass kicking ambitions full-time.
The purpose of the above story was not to evangelize one language or platform over the other. It was to illustrate a point about choosing to do what you love through my own personal experience. Hopefully some of you will be catalyzed to do the same.