Where’s the Passion?

I am surprised every year at the lack of turnout for our local Boise Code Camp.  The local Windows Vista launch event drew 500 people in for the promise a free copy of Windows, but our day long Code Camp that covered all sorts of technologies drew under 300.  Wow.

I recently attended the local .Net Users Group and got a great overview of .Net 3.0 including some genuine depth on WCF.  Nice!  There were about 20 people in the room.

There is no local Java users group and I understand that the inter-denominational Boise Software Development Group meetings are sparsely attended.

OK, so people don’t have the time meet with their peers once a month in the evenings to better their craft.  I get it.  They must be reading a lot and experimenting with new technologies at home, right?  Not in my experience. 

Where is the passion?  Did it stop being fun to make software?  Remember when you were 12 or so and the feeling you got when you made a for loop print “I kick ass” a million times?  That feeling is still in there somewhere.  This is cool stuff.  Making software is part craft, part science, and part art and I am proud to be a practitioner.

It came as a great shock to me to realize the majority of people out there writing code are doing so because it is a good job.  Not because they have a passion for it.  Not because they can’t help themselves, but because it pays relatively well and provides some vocational stability. Those are certainly great things, but is that really enough to get you through a day?

So what is the point of this post?  You might expect me to call for higher attended user groups, more private study, or learning a new language.  Those are great things, but let’s begin more basically than that.  If you have lost the lust for making your computer do something cool, start there.  Make your computer do something cool that only interests you.  The criteria is that you have to actually code to make it work.  OK, maybe not code, but you can’t just play video games and call it good, you must make something.

Here are some ideas to get you started.

• Buy some X10 modules and turn on disco lasers from work or something. 
• Time lapse photo stitch your ant farm into a movie.
• Write a Windows service that runs on your wife’s laptop and randomly causes it to play bad music snippets.
• Write a mashup that shows maps the houses of everyone you’ve ever dated.  Don’t bother if there is a cluster of 2 dots.
• Program a Lego robot to follow you.
• Create a Windows Media Player visualization.
• Start a blog of your own.
• Learn to Photoshop your friends into horror film scenes.
• Write a random shape/sound/color generator for your one year old to play with while smashing food into an old keyboard.
• Implement chess.

What is fun for you?