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Staying Motivated

I've noticed that over the past couple of months, I've lost some motivation to stay current with technology. I haven't spent any time with MVC for ASP.NET, or IronRuby, or LiveMesh, or F#, or pretty much anything new that's come out Microsoft, and here's why:

Parenting. When 8:30 rolls around and the kids are in bed, I'm just too tired to want to hop onto the laptop and code away for a while.
Health. I know I've put on some "bad" pounds over the last 2-3 years. It's leveled out now at 220-225 for the last 6 months, but I need to loose some fat. My stamina has dropped a bit because of this.
Repetition. Don't get me wrong: All of the technologies I've mentioned are nice...but frankly it's nothing new. Nothing's come out in a while that's made me go "ho...ly...crap, I gotta drop everything and learn this, because I have no idea what it's about, and it's going to be around for 20 years." It seems like frameworks (other than .NET and the JVM) and languages come and go with the tide

My passions have always been with lower-level aspects that are relevant across technologies, like IL, concurrency, etc. Yes, there's Phoenix and ParallelFX. I'm hoping for the day where I can do assembly re-writing at any point in the process (post-compilation, pre-jit) in managed code with classes in the BCL (or at least another framework officially supported by MS).

* Posted at 05.06.2008 07:58:18 AM (Last Update: 05.07.2008 11:23:35 AM) | 2 comments | Link | RSS *

Comments

# I'm right there with you..., from James McConnell at 05.06.2008 02:04:03 PM

...except for the last part as I've never gotten that into the lower-level stuff. But yeah, by the time the kid is in bed, there is either too much to do around the house or I just don't have the energy (physically or mentally) to really dig into new technologies. Hell, I don't have the energy to dig into the projects I do have outside of work.

So yeah, I totally get what you're saying.

James

# Erlang?, from Kurt Christensen at 05.07.2008 11:23:31 AM

I've been in the same boat for years. Technology has started to bore the crap out of me because you so rarely see anything that's honestly new, and good. I've given up caring about framework-y stuff, because that's all flavor of the month (just for fun, pick a product or framework in the MS technology stack and see if you can identify how many names it's had in it's lifetime... and you can say that same thing about stuff from IBM or Sun...)

Having whined like a little girl, let me tell you what *does* seem new and interesting to me now:

- Distributed version control systems. Git and the like are a legitimately new way to think about version control, and - I've come to believe - a much better way to think about version control.

- Different OSs. I used whatever the current version of Windows was for the last decade, and I was perfectly happy. But then all the bloat with crappy anti-virus software, and crappy Office software, and crappy everything else just started to bug me. So for the last six months I've been rolling with a Macbook Pro, and I've really enjoyed the change of pace. Don't let anyone kid you that Macs are perfect - I've got all sorts of things about my machine that I hate, but overall this is the happiest I've been with a computer in a decade. Also, the latest Linux distros have **FINALLY** created a user experience that doesn't make you want to stick broken glass in your urethra. In general, it's been fun to re-enter the world of Unix, although MS Powershell has lessened the sell of this for me somewhat (now my only question is why it took MS so friggin long to make a non-crippled shell environment??!??)

- New languages. New to me, anyway. Most "new" languages are just taking us closer to 1960 (see below), but some languages genuinely seems to be trying out some new ideas - Erlang in particular.

And here's what's old and interesting:

- Lisp dialects. It seems like every "advance" in programming languages just brings us closer to Lisp. So why not go straight to the source? I've been trying out Arc, which is too young to be very usable for most people, but it sure is pretty. The true power of Lisp is the macro facility, which enables syntactic abstraction in a way that just doesn't come very naturally in any other language.

- Off and on for the past two years, I've been revisiting the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I think it's probably the only book that really repays careful study. I learn something every time I go back.

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