Career Moves

A little over a year ago, when I was sent an info packet about Deloitte there was an exert from Business Week - The Best Places to Launch a Career - that ranked Deloitte #3. 

"Great," I thought, but that was all I thought. 

I never took a deep analysis to what it meant for them to be #3, or why they would send me this article. This word, career, has been used, talked about, presented throughout the year - "It's your career; take ownership. Mass Career Customization." However, now, as I've just begun the year-end process and started to look back on this year and forward to many that will come, I'm thrown directly into this conversation. 

What does the word mean to me. I must have this strange definition of the word Career, one that doesn't fit me, one that makes me take a stuttering breath to digest my thoughts before discussing it with my colleagues: careers are what parents, friends parents, managers, or business majors have. I'm just attempting something I'm interested in, something that challenges me to think critically - is that a career?

I don't want to sound pretentious here, building a career is great, but I've decided to define career and my interpretation of the word career. My career is not my vocation, my career is the skill set I bring to the table and how I want to use those skills.

I'm not to going measure my goals in benchmarks or highlights; I'm going to take a day to day approach. My career goal is that I constantly put myself in a position to grow my skill set, and stay open to new opportunities that will put me in those positions. I want to consistently take on new challenges. My five year plan is to improve and stay interested in what I'm doing everyone of those days. 

That is one thing nice about consulting all those opportunities are with one company.  In the end, this post kind of makes me want to gag, but I'm not going to lie and say "five years from now I want to be a tech lead or functional lead." One day I'll have to look further down the path, but for now, I'm happy saying that I'm not going become stagnant or take a step back. I'm going to keep progressing and see where that goes; so far it's gone a long way in eight months - since July 30.

This is not the Pony Express

On Tuesday I was tasked to track down information, and insure the appropriate procedure was followed for application change requests; unfortunately, the information was trapped in exchange server that I could only access through my Outlook 2002 client. There was this wealth of information exactly where I thought it was in one place - I had seen it, read it, noted it, replied to it, and talked about it just a few weeks early, but yet it was strewn about, unindexed, without a reg-ex search, and lost in the shuffle between every conversation I've had recently.

After a deep breath and a few random clicks on the menu bar I gave up; one by one I cycled through my mess of an inbox and other related folders. Outlook forces you to put your email into these silos of inbox, sent, drafts, etc...but really when it comes down to it each one is a message where planned, to me, from me, or about me. They are my messages, and they exist in this entangled web of response/receive protocol. This is one of the features I love about gmail - no folders just labels, and messages can have more than one label. They are easy to add and easy to see. Gmail enables me to see my mail in these chambers but I can knock them down, move them around at my will.

Outlook seems unwilling to change it's three panel view, and it has remained stale and bulking over the years; however, there is an interesting start up xobni (inbox backwards) that has a great Outlook plug-in. It has an index search, statistics about usage, and a intuitive sidebar with contacts and threaded conversations. Xobni is a great start, and has truly engaged a thoughtful discussion about the direction email is headed. I'm ready for the next step where email starts to shed its mail persona and take a more evolved collaboration approach.

My company has recently released an internal social network. Getting to the site is a pain - passwords are entered multiple times and pop-ups appear in every corner of the screen - and it doesn't have much beyond my basic info. The idea is to encourage networking - creating this online community; unfortunately, they have failed to realize the best social network they have is already well established in email. They already have my network - my contacts, their contacts, how often I reach out to them, and about what; they have my abilities - where I've been staffed, my role, and duration. Why can't I add a picture, interests, capabilities, or papers to my address card? Everything is there waiting to be used, waiting to be labeled, placed into threads, to-do's, reference...and it's just fading away when the email hits the 180 MB storage limit and it's not indexed. It's a sad day when  knowledge based company that depends on ideas let's them fall of the map into a personal archived oasis.

In its current iteration, Outlook is not the right client for this, but maybe one day. Gmail takes a great integrated approach, chat and email in one, and continues to set the pace. I'm tired of waiting for someone to do to the email client what flock did to the web-browsers. I want to see the weekly newsletters become an rss feeds, an integrated blog tool , document exchange, live search, group conversations, chat, and remove the silos. I want to organize my email vertically across conversations and horizontally across topics and projects. I don't have calendar events to be a group of emails sent out to the attends - I want it to be an event on the server that people are invited to, can see, and maybe update.

It's time to take control of my email.

Math

April is math awareness month! Check out these interesting articles, topics, problems, and facts about math:

Math, Origami, and Protein Folding from the NYTimes.

Are we wired for math? from the New Yorker (warning: long).

Math Education from the NYTimes.

Monty Hall problem - a classic that beats intuition.

Paul Erdos - my favorite mathematician.

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers - my favorite popular math book (biography of the aforementioned Paul Erdos).

Topology - my favorite subject.

Pythagorean Theorem - a proof?

I'm going to get some chalk so I can tag the side walk with some proofs.

Capital Crescent

Another bike ride this weekend. With an ominous email sent out friday afternoon, "ride will be canceled if it's raining at 8 am," the ride was in flux, but the rained stayed away just enough to make for a pleasant day.

We met for breakfast in Georgetown. On my way to Georgetown, I saw Mayor Fenty spectating a little league game at 9 am with a red tie and an overarching umbrella that could have kept the entire dugout dry. I wanted to shout good job and give a big thumbs up, but I restrained myself. 

By the time I got to Dean & DeLuca, the slight drizzle cleared away, and it was nice enough to sit at their sidewalk cafe to enjoy a blueberry muffin and some coffee. The bike rack overflowed and the rumble of clip shoes pounding away on the brick sidewalk dominated the early morning noise. 

With a few instructions, a count of people, and a couple snippets of advice we were on the Capital Crescent trail. The trail follows old railroad tracks along Potomac and through the leafy parts of the city. At mile 6 we split off from the tracks and headed up MacArthur blvd into the heart of the prestigious suburbs that comprise Montgomery Co. I peddled and peddled, past the mini mansions and let their fancy cars power by me. The ride ended at Great Falls Park which unfortunately I didn't have enough time to explore. 

We headed back to Georgetown, this time down hill, and got lunch - lunch after a forty mile ride tasted pretty good.

Also in the news of today:

I bought Rock Band.

I made Granola.

I clean my apartment to make room for Rock Band.

Today was eventful.

Technology and me

Let me digress. Coming in the workforce without experience, a day doesn't go by that I don't learn something new at work. Code aside too, I'm being pushed. The applications I make replace systems - systems built with oracle forms, access, SQL Server, and other mismatched technology. People's jobs and daily tasks depend on the work I do, and I take pride in the quality and usability of my applications. However well I feel I do, the legacy systems seem to creep along rolling over small unappealing traits that the user expects. "It used to look like this. Why does it now look like this? Why is the button here? What are my roles? Do I have access to this. Well, no I don't use it, but sometimes if they ask me this then I could find the answer there." It's nothing personal with what I developed, it is just what they used everyday for four years and now it's completely different.

I decided to take a similar adventure - learn something new. A language, a new framework, a new idea, and see how I do. With the elite jumping off the Ruby on Rails bandwagon, I decided there was room for me to jump on. I didn't know any Ruby and never used rails. A simple google search, "ruby rails os x," reviled a quick tutorial. Installed Ruby, RubyGems, Rails, and MySQL and I was off. Wait, I've learned my lesson before - bookmark the Ruby and the Rails docs. Okay now search "ruby rails os x." Generate a migration script, fill in some fields, and type the word scaffold. Then "oh! There is my first ruby on rails webpage. Not too much exciting just Create, Read, Update, and Destroy (CRUD) functionality. I explored further. What else does this get me? Pagination. A few more lines of code and I got some validation. Let's take this a little further. For the first few tasks the general work flow was google search, cut, paste, edit, try again, try again, oh I see, try again, and works. Without much experience I navigated around the RubyOnRails magic. I didn't jump in, just dabbled and took things in small steps, a change here does this, a change there does that.

"Convention over configuration" or Ruby magic are RoR's unofficial slogans; at first, it was frustrating - this unexpected behavior. Eventually, I found out that if I want to configure I can, but it just takes investigation and google to find out where. If Ruby On Rails was someone's first framework, it hides the MVC standard. I can live with that as long as we don't end up with a generation of PHP hackers.

The Scene

I earned double hipster points this week. Once on thursday by showing up at work with a Black Cat stamp on my hand from the Jens Lekman show, and once on Friday by the Black Cat stamp on my hand from the Les Savy Fav show.

Hipster points this month: 2. Good start to April. I'm not positive how the scale works, but I might get a bonus point because both shows were sold out. Tickets to a sold out show are always a great fact for a formulated conversation at work.

"What's that on your hand?"

"Oh, yeah I tried to wash that off. It's from the Black Cat show last night."

"I heard that was sold out! How'd you get tickets?"

The Jens show was fun. The band was dressed in black rather than white, and the airplane dance moves warmed my heart again. Most everyone in the crowd seemed to be in love with Jens; don't blame them.

On Friday, Tim Harrington, the Les Savy Fav singer, spent time in between songs parodying the show 24 and it continued after the encore from backstage. Through all his antics on stage he manage to hold on to the microphone even when he changed light-bulbs while walking on top of the bar - professional. He owns his own textile company.

Long walk today. Got an empanada, and then found the new Target.