theShizit

The Shizit! What does that mean!?! It means the “real deal”! We used to say it when I was a young lad, when all I cared about was a good party, playing loud music, and skating (as in skateboarding). I had a passion for computers since very young but didn’t get an opportunity to indulge in it until my very late teens .. early 20s. But I can say for the last 15 years it has consumed my life and thoughts, it has become my main passion. I still love playing music, a good party, and occasionally skating though.

Fritz, so what? Get on with it!

Just wait! When I started out, I worked for a big financial institution, really excelled, got promotions, developed what I thought at the time were really important applications, kept things running, hammered out more applications, kept getting bonuses, everything felt rad! I got really stoked over the fact that I could further my education and the company would support and pay for it. So after work I would go to my computer science classes until 10pm every other night, tried super hard, got awarded academic achievement in computer science. In the meantime, I got married, bought a house, had kids. Continuing university became impossible unless I wanted to be a dead-beat dad.

And my career got boring… really, really boring. It wasn’t challenging anymore, but when I looked at other jobs it all seemed a big pile of the same. It got so boring I didn’t care where I worked, so I quit and found a similar job. Closer to home, less commute. It gave me more time to spend with the family and do other things that were important to me.

The years have blown by – so many cool things had happened, so much learned, so many challenges. But when at college (programmer/analyst concentration), before working as a developer or going to university, I didn’t want to do typical business development. I wanted to work on games, online apps, I loved the information accessibility of the internet – cool fun things! I’ve done some cool things in the business/enterprise realm, but the cause isn’t for me. I’m developing and making good money, but it’s time to take it to the next level.

If you can’t become part of a company that inspires you, maybe it’s time to start something inspiring. Right? So that’s my quest.

Well, and I’ve been applying to inspiring companies. I applied @ bandcamp, solved their puzzles, got the email address to apply, had a few email conversations with the co-founder, who seems like a really cool guy. Unfortunately, my skill set and experience is not aligned with what they needed. Latest was Digitally Imported, once again solved the puzzle to get the email address to apply. Applied and have heard nothing. No big deal – these no-gos are giving me more motivation to keep improving.

I’m looking at my current skills… What I know best is mostly Microsoft based technologies. It’s what big and small enterprises love to use. All my applications have been internal/intranet applications. Business units don’t really care what’s in a program as long as it does an alright job and doesn’t crash. Then it will be changed to something else in 2 years, when Microsoft releases a new version of their tool sets.

So changes, right…… what I am going to do? Well,

• keep on applying to companies that inspire me
• work on my blog and website to showcase ME
• become a RAD Rubyist! Not because it’s trendy, but because it’s a creative and inspiring language. This lends itself to creative and inspiring projects.
• hammer out some side projects! I’m actively working on
1. an Open Source survey software called “Gather” and
2. tools for bands, code-named ‘Guitaritis’ with 3 other developers. Both projects use RoR and other open source technologies.

I’ll try to blog about these projects regularly, post some tutorials on the technologies I’m using, and anything else to help out the peeps.

I’ll minimize these kind of whining blog posts, but I had to vent it out.

Check back often, Yeaaaah Budddy!

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