Upcomming at work is career planning. One of the companies biggest issues discovered by exit interviews (and the months later followup) is a sense of career development. To address this they insitiuted a formal career discussion with one's manager. The whole thing has got me in a reflective mood.

In high school, I always fiddled with things. I got a kick out of installing the latest linux kernel and intresting software packages I found, but I never got into modifing them, or building anything intresting with them. I was intrested in stringing together the schools novell servers and unix lab. In college I never really got involved with the many cool projects that were going on arround me, I just took on administrative type supporting positions. I did however play with Beos and got intrested in metadata and what be's filesystem did with 'em. Post college I ended up working for a big software company in a test development position. On the side there, I wrote one or two tools that had a few months of popularity before becomming obsolete. The one thing that has consistanly made my day was having a user use my code, and even better, suggest improvements.

In my job this turns out to be a pretty rare ocurance, and I haven't yet pull enough willpower together to do something outside of work. Mabye my real career goal needs to be based around that. In the short term a position that tends to lend itself to my code getting used externally coupled with customer feedback.

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