It's been quite an eventful year in 2005 as I reflect from my family's home
in New York. The last twelve months have further established my future in
Pittsburgh and have taught me a great deal about responsibility and attitude
-- namely that I should have less of both.
I'm a Veteran Now
Earlier this year a friend showed me the PTO (Paid Time Off) accrual
schedule for her company. Her company offered two weeks of PTO for each of the
first five years of employment, three weeks for each of years 6-14, and
so forth up to six weeks for employees with at least 30 years'
experience. That frightened me, because next month I'll celebrate the
third anniversary of joining my first and so far only full-time employer.
I must be crazy. I've been told that now is the time for me to be taking
risks, to jump fearlessly from job to job in pursuit of ever-increasing
success, to ruthlessly network and to turn my back on any company because it's
me I should be worried about. Is it a sign of weakness to say that
I actually like what I do?
Upon graduation I chose to take a risk and join a small startup company
with fewer than 30 employees. Since then the company has tripled in size and
I feel like I've grown with it. I went from a "baptism of fire" on my first
project to a leadership role on products today. I derive satisfaction from
what I do, and when I don't feel happy, I can talk to someone about it.
That's why I'm staying put.
It's pretty frightening to already be a veteran with about three years'
experience. More and more people ask me questions that begin with "Who's our
resident expert on…," and my only response is an awkward "I suppose
it's me." I hope not to be the only resident expert at my company on
any given topic when the first urgent 2:00 AM phone call comes.
Homeowner
It was with great fanfare and joy that I closed on
a little carriage house in Highland Park which I called
Blank Slate
at the end of this past April. This year I learned that real estate is a
dangerous, treacherous, expensive proposition. Real estate agents live a dual
life: one minute they're casually schmoozing with the neighbors or their
fellow agents, and the next they're on the phone hammering out a deal.
I looked at some 50 houses before, in the span of nine hours, I went from
seeing Blank Slate for the first time to having an offer accepted on it.
Sometimes I regret buying a home. Sometimes I think I jumped in too soon.
Living by myself, I have to deal with any sort of repair or renovation
personally. I've lost time from work waiting for installers and repairmen but
everything is in good working order for the winter ahead. The school district
already appealed my 2005 property assessment and got it increased more than
100% from its previous value; there's already an appeal from the district for
the 2006 year.
In any case my home is still perfect and I'm happy with it. It, as a
former tenant told me, is "straight pimp as a bachelor pad." Despite that fact
I've never had occasion to use the hot tub… yet.
Whither Gaming?
There's been an Xbox 360 sitting under my TV all month and I couldn't care
less about it.
It's not my Xbox, of course -- I wouldn't dream of paying $400 on
that when I could buy better things like
four
tenths of a door. I'm hanging onto it for a friend for now. It's just one
of a few new consoles that have come out in the past year-plus that haven't
interested me in the least.
Between work, the gym, the house, and time with friends, I don't really
have time to finish the games I have, let alone buy new ones. The Nintendo
DS and Sony PSP are interesting little gizmos, but I don't spend nearly
enough time on the road to enjoy them. The only gadget I take the time
to use is the iPod with Video on which I watch TV shows while using the
exercise bike or elliptical machine. This year for the first time I found
myself preferring a real treadmill to a leveling treadmill.
JavaScript is the Future
Ten years ago there wasn't much love in this world for people who
considered themselves "JavaScript programmers." They were derided by "real"
programmers who wrote software for real-mode machines. JavaScript only works
in a web browser; C works everywhere. I felt the same way about Perl
programmers during the first dot-com boom: why are all these people hacking
away at inefficient interpreted code that's so narrowly-focused? Now I write
Perl for a living and JavaScript is hailed as the second coming of the web as
an application platform.
"Web 2.0" means that the computer as we know it will exist as an object
model manipulated entirely within the context of a web browser. It's about
taking practices and models that have existed in the PC world for 25 years and
reimplementing them inside a much more restrictive environment. Years ago
only Microsoft put so much "non-standard" cruft into the web browser,
transforming HTML into Dynamic HTML; more recently Mozilla and Google got on
board and things took a turn. Now there's a coordinated network of
JavaScript development called
JSAN
and enough new-fangled buzzwords to get the next generation of venture
capitalists chomping at the bit.
I've worked on web applications for nearly three years now and I still have
the same love-hate relationship with them as I did at the outset. On the plus
side there's no clearing software with clients' IT departments, but on the
minus side every task has to go through the network. Services like
social bookmarking and web mail are great, but they go down and there's
nothing you can do about them. When del.icio.us went down this year, scores
of my bookmarks dropped out of sight. Should Hotmail or Gmail suffer another
security breach or outage, how many millions of users will have to live
without their mail for a while? I'd rather trust a server I either run myself
or that holds itself to a higher standard of availability. Of course in the
real world, Hotmail and Gmail are pretty reliable and my provider,
Fastmail, experienced a multiple-day outage
in November.
Plans For 2006
Give More Away
I live alone and don't have too many big expenses ahead of me. Next year
I won't spend nearly as much on my home as I did in 2005. Meanwhile there are
neighborhood organizations like
the Union Project and national
organizations that I ought to support as much as I can. That's why next year
I plan to donate at least 5% of my salary in cash, goods, and services
to charitable organizations both local and national. Realistically I think I
can even give 10%.
Travel More
I wanted to travel internationally this year but it didn't happen. Next
year I already have domestic trips planned that will take me to Providence and
Austin to meet friends I haven't seen in years or ever. I'd also
like to take a week to tour Israel meeting up with a friend and my relatives
who live near Tel Aviv. My parents spent a week there this past year and were
amazed by the hospitality and the sights they saw in such a short period of
time.
Be Nicer
With more responsibility comes more pressure at work. I realize that
I've been very stressed at times and, like my predecessor, started detaching
myself a bit to try to get more work done in the same amount of time. Finding
a balance between my own work and helping co-workers takes a lot of time and
dedication and I'd like to invest both next year.
Be Selfless
Just a few paragraphs into this update I noticed how much I use the word
"I" in my writing. That's no good. A personal web site is nothing if not
narcissistic, but really I'm getting tired of just writing about myself all
the time. That's why starting next year I'll start writing about other things
in a more freeform format. I'm also going to be retiring the content
management system (CMS) I wrote myself in 2001 in favor of a server-side,
database-backed system like WordPress or Mambo/Joomla. That way I can enjoy
more of the newer more-connected Web by jumping onto every bandwagon and
trying every trend. Hey, some of them can't be all bad.
It's been a fun year in 2005. Here's to another.