Purpose, Part 2
Posted:
(Finishing a blog post originally drafted on 12/29/2009)
Now that I’ve established a purpose for this blog, I thought about my own purpose.
It seems to be part of human nature to question our purpose in life continuously. Even when we seem to have it figured out, the question sneaks up on us again. I’ve attended several places of higher education in the last few years, and my concept of what I want to do with my life has shifted during that time.
In the past 8 months or so, I had convinced myself that my interests didn’t align with working on web applications anymore. After thinking about the problem I had decided that some day I’d like to get a graduate degree in bioinformatics, which is one field where being a clever programmer and applying Computer Science theory are both good things. Web apps, in comparison, rarely use CS theory and felt like copy/pasting functionality together to please a client.
Bioinformatics also has the potential to do good in the world. Diseases could be cured, science and medicine could be advanced, and people’s lives could be made better with the suitable application of data, code, and computing power. Web apps rarely have the ability to change the world, much less do good in it. Sure, there’s websites like Kiva making a positive change in the world, but the majority of work to be had in developing web apps is not so altruistic.
The distinction for me is whether the problem space is interesting. Interesting stuff is far more likely to make me happy and hold my attention. Interestingness is intangible, of course, but certain topics lend themselves to be interesting for me.
In the past year I had a stint at a consulting shop doing Java Wicket/Hibernate development and a Rails project. The consulting shop promised interesting in-house projects using natural language processing and location based services towards creating some interesting tools. Sadly, I never got to work on them. I was the last in the door, and so I was the first out when money got tight.
There’s a certain amount of soul-searching to do after losing your job. I went on that journey after losing my job and ended up back in school, studying primarily mathematics. And I’m loving it. But I don’t see math as a viable career, either in applications (like economics/finance) or teaching it. Those just aren’t my strong points.
One of the problems I’ve run into is that I’ve felt like my coding skills have gone stagnant in the time since I lost my job. I stopped needing to code and be on top of things, and at the same time stopped learning. One of my goals for 2010 to correct this is to learn constantly. It’s not an easy task in the scope of everything I want to learn in my lifetime. For me, learning goes beyond just getting a college diploma, or knowing enough to squeeze by in your day job.
I was heavily influenced when I was younger by a book called How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci (Amazon affiliate link), which explained the concept of a Renaissance (wo)man. While the book’s exercises didn’t stick, the concept of being a modern Renaissance man did. The result is that I’ve become an information sponge, especially on topics that seem useless to other people. Having a wide-ranging knowledge of the world doesn’t necessarily pay off in terms of a better salary, but it ultimately makes you a better citizen of the world, in my book.
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