Staying Motivated

I’ve noticed that over the past couple of months, I’ve lost some motivation to stay current with technology. I haven’t spent any time with MVC for ASP.NET, or IronRuby, or LiveMesh, or F#, or pretty much anything new that’s come out Microsoft, and here’s why:

Parenting. When 8:30 rolls around and the kids are in bed, I’m just too tired to want to hop onto the laptop and code away for a while.
Health. I know I’ve put on some “bad” pounds over the last 2-3 years. It’s leveled out now at 220-225 for the last 6 months, but I need to loose some fat. My stamina has dropped a bit because of this.
Repetition. Don’t get me wrong: All of the technologies I’ve mentioned are nice … but frankly it’s nothing new. Nothing’s come out in a while that’s made me go “ho … ly … crap, I gotta drop everything and learn this, because I have no idea what it’s about, and it’s going to be around for 20 years.” It seems like frameworks (other than .NET and the JVM) and languages come and go with the tide

My passions have always been with lower-level aspects that are relevant across technologies, like IL, concurrency, etc. Yes, there’s Phoenix and ParallelFX. I’m hoping for the day where I can do assembly re-writing at any point in the process (post-compilation, pre-jit) in managed code with classes in the BCL (or at least another framework officially supported by MS).

Published: 05.06.2008 06:58:18 AM CST

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Jason Bock

Staying Motivated