Finding your voice

Who are you? What are you all about? What makes you tick? Why should people care about you, professionally speaking?

This is what your entire career success boils down to. The more you can answer those questions, the bigger your chance of success.

I've been playing catch-up all my life. Since I was in high school, all I did was learn what the cool kids had managed to learn the year before. I'd copy their code, mimic their environment, duplicate their cool features. Later on, in my first job, I introduced .Net at work, 4 years late! When I finally moved to C# 2.0, it was already 2007 and Visual Studio 2008 as almost out the door. All of this is not some sort of new revelation to me. I've known that for a while already.

I didn't try Ruby on Rails until it was popular and I still haven't learned Javascript or Java. I know about the Solid principles, but that's because they've been explained to me during seminars. I've also decided to thoroughly learn Common Lisp, a language that peaked in the 70s!!

See, I'm not figuring things out. I let other do it for me and I'm always late to the party. All of this isn't necessarily a bad thing. There is a career to be made out of specializing in old, or even dying technologies, as I've read in the Passionate Programmer. There are people having great success in their life because they are part of a dwindling class of badly needed Cobol programmers. Many, many complex systems are built using .Net and Java, so specializing exclusively on those platforms can be rewarding and being on the front edge of those technologies won't give you much of an advantage.

This is not for me. I'm a generalist. I don't become an expert, I just become proficient in a lot of disciplines and hope that one day two of those will connect and let me do something innovative.

Then I'll have something to talk about.