My Career Goals

I was going to tweet about this, but then I thought I’d have to make a bunch of tweets, and writing a blurgh post just seemed easier. Plus I don’t really have any puns in this post, so I can’t tweet it!

My Career Goals

I think many people aren’t sure what they want to do in their career. When I first started programming, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my career. But after years of experience, my career aspirations have become crystal clear. I would like my job to be:

• Improving Ruby and Rails internals
• Teaching people

Improving Ruby and Rails internals

I got my first job programming in 1999. At that time, I didn’t know I wanted to be a programmer, it was just a way for me to pay for school. It turned out that I was pretty good at programming, so I decided that would be my career. To be honest, at that time I didn’t really love programming. I just found that I was good at it, and I could make decent money. In 2005 I found Ruby and Rails and that’s when I actually learned that I love programming. I loved Ruby so much that I learned Japanese so I could read blog posts about Ruby. 14 years later, I can easily read those blog posts, but I don’t actually need them. Oops!

The reason I want to work on Ruby and Rails internals is that I want the language and framework to be performant, stable, easy to use. I want Ruby and Rails to be a great choice for people to use in production. I want others to experience the same joy I felt writing Ruby, and I want to make sure there are business that will employ those people.

Teaching People

I love to teach people things I know. I also love learning new things. As I hack on language and framework internals, I try to take that knowledge an disseminate it to as many people as I can.

Why?

First, I don’t think people can feel the joy of programming in Ruby/Rails unless they know how to actually program with Ruby/Rails. So I’m happy to help new folks get in to the language and framework.

Second, I realize I’m not going to be around forever, and I want to make sure that these technologies will outlive me. If these technologies are going to survive in to the future, people need to understand how they work. Simply put: it’s an insurance policy for the future.

Third, it’s just fun.

Summary

My dream job is to hack Ruby/Rails internals and teach people everything I know. Doing it is fun for me, and it’s the best way I can use my skills to make a real impact on the world.

The End.