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The Old Goal, Revisited

Quick redirect (more to refresh myself than anyone who is going to read previous posts and then this one without feeling any gap in time--kinda like binge watching an older show on Netflix wondering why the season in 2007/8 was only 1.5 real episodes): This blog was initially created to serve in an alternate timeline where I did not have an internship over the summer. My goal was to develop a web and/or mobile app from scratch, as a way to keep my skills sharp and prepare for graduation in December. This blog was supposed to be a way to document to potential employers "Hey look--I can do the things, even if no one has paid me to yet! And I can write about them, with personality even!"

 So What Changed?

A late but extremely welcome change to this plan was an offer to intern at OrangeBoy, Inc here in Columbus--an exciting small firm that combines a software-as-a-service platform called Savannah with public service consulting expertise to help libraries and similar institutions engage their customers. I should take this moment to expressly state anything you read here, or in any other space in the internet, is my own happy thought that I alone am responsible for and has absolutely nothing to do with OrangeBoy.

So I find it amusing that my last post was on 6/4, the day before I started there. It's been a wild, informative, career-choice-affirming ride that I'm lucky enough to continue through fall semester--but, of course, a job plus school doesn't mean we give up on our side projects. Oh no. Far from it--the job and the homework and all the lessons learned have sharpened the focus and given new purpose to the side projects--an opportunity to build a better clock.

"I am not reading that article--what the hell does building clocks have to do with programming?" -- several readers, probably. 

The short version? Jim Collins explains it thusly:
"Imagine that you met a remarkable person who could look at the sun or the stars and, amazingly, state the exact time and date. Wouldn’t it be even more amazing still if, instead of telling the time, that person built a clock that could tell the time forever, even after he or she were dead and gone?"
Collins uses it to explain business leaders--flashy CEOs with vision to personally drag their company to greatness, but fail to instill that vision in an institutional memory so it will run with or without them. I think it's an even better analogy for software developers.

What do I mean by that? Well...maybe that's better saved for for a new post.
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