I was stumbling the web as usual a few days back. I came across a keynote speech by Chris. This has changed my entire perspective of viewing the software business and industry. I have till now just enjoyed life as a programmer, reusing existing code, ‘googling’ what I don’t know and getting the job done by time.
My life as a software engineer has just been concentrated on providing solutions that already exist. But real software engineering is not that. My goal in life is not that. I need to engineer something. A product, that people use in their day to day life. I remember my Engineering Mechanics professor’s definition of an engineer, ‘A person who creates, engineers something so that it is useful to the society in their daily life’. That is what I feel as the soul calling.
This keynote address, http://gist.github.com/6443 was what I have been wanting to inspire me. He tells what a software is all about. It is the passion of a programmer that creates the wonder, a Real Software. What a programmer needs to do? The real joy comes from within and not from materialistic gains.
What in the world can be more inspiring than one’s own creation. I have had moments when I felt this joy, pride and enthusiasm, that comes when I did programming, when a thing that I have been struggling with, at last comes to place, when the very blank mind of mine, finds a solution to a problem, when a client or peer appreciates. But they did not last long.
Open Source is calling me to contribute. I have started out with Ruby and Python. Any suggestions are always welcome.
Raasukutty's 