| I think I got very lucky or I get easily passionate about things. When I was 13 I wanted to become a hacker, my dad got me a scrape yard DOS box with a then already obsolete 386SX. There was GW-Basic on it and I hacked away trying to implement viruses. I got me a QBasic compiler and wrote a programm that overwrites the config.sys and autoexec.bat and catches the usual interrupt keys like ctrl-c. Then it showed a blinking colorful ascii-art. My mother was not impressed when I let it run on her accounting machine... Fast forward 3 years, I played piano for a while but it felt not cool enough and I was in to classic rock (I still am) so I wanted to learn guitar since I couldn't afford a Hammond organ. My friends needed a bass player and so I listened to my favorite songs, figuring out what bass players actually do and it got me. So I learned bass. 2 years later I finished school and wanted to study Jazz with my bass, tried to get into universities but they somehow felt I wasn't completely behind it, being more of a rock guy, still I wanted to move out from home. I remembered my coding sessions from my early teens and went into CS. After 2 semesters I realized that programming and reading about CS 8 hours a day is fun, 8 hours of practicing bass isn't. Since then I love my job and still have fun with a blues rock band in the evenings. Only downside, I don't do martial arts anymore (Boxing, Kali), I got afraid of hand injuries. So as stated, there was a lot of luck involved but still I found out, if there is a slight chance something is fun to do and you invest some energy, you probably develop some passion for it. I never thought about it if something is commercially useful or if I even got good enough to stay out of the masses, I don't do magic on the bass, I'm not the best dev out there. But at least I feel good after coming home from work and every time wasted with the band is time well spent. What else do I want? |