Career Capital, Focusing, More Golang

081514

Reading “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” by Cal Newport seems like I’ve been reading a lot of self-help books lately, but it’s more an exploration of “How can I maximize myself right now.” My wife and I just had our first child. One thing I realized in the hospital is that I’m not one person anymore. So my current discovery is “how can I maximize myself for the well-being of my new self(s)”? Brings up a lot of questions about what I value, and whether or not money really makes me, etc etc. “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” challenges the idea that I should maximize what I put into a “passion” and, instead, maximize the work I put into the success I’ve had so far.

So without repeating the book, because I recommend that you read it, I’m trying to tie this into my current, un-focused pursuit of becoming a better programmer. I have to keep telling myself to be patient. One truth is that my career future remains in programming. The voice in my head says “you don’t have a degree in computer science, so you will probably not be able to pass a hardcore programming interview.” But I have a lot to offer as far as languages and design. And I’m always told that it doesn’t matter if you have a computer science degree, but they aren’t convincing the voice in my head.

So looking back, I could have applied the principles of investing in career capital and structured practice into ONE of the languages or practices that I’ve learned over the past few years but I h aven’t really done that. In 3 years I’ve spent time learning C#, Node.js, and Golang. I’ve also spent time learning TDD, DDD, Refactoring, and Enterprise Patterns. These seem to be my current career capital. The question is: Should I start focusing and gaining more capital with what little time I have right now? OR: Should I cash in on a bit of career capital for a direction in which I can build more capital in a focused subset of one of the above categories?

I’m still thoroughly liking the idea of Go and overall just writing the code. It’s been the easiest language so far to get up and running with and I’m already productive with it, based on what little work I’ve done with it. I really like being closer to the internals — like the fact that strings are UTF-8 and I have to be aware of slicing of strings because they can be represented by 2 byte sequences.