A perfect life

A recent conversation about the future prompted me to reconsider my definition of success. I still want to create a product that improves the lives of millions of people and earns me millions. However, I don't need that level of success to support my ideal lifestyle. I require only four things:

Wife and kids

My life won't be complete without a mate to share my life with and children to teach and learn from.

Work I love

I need to spend my working hours doing something I enjoy for a purpose I believe in. Doing otherwise would be a waste of my precious time.

Three day work week

My wife and I need to be able to support our family's lifestyle working only 8 hours per day three days per week. That way, at least one of us will be home with the children every day. Until all of my children enter school, I want to spend more than half of my time with them. There's no more valuable gift I can give my children than my time and attention.

Ability to relocate

I want to move my family to a new area every two years. My own family's frequent relocations gave me a broader perspective on life and helped me develop my independence. I want to bestow the same benefits on my children. Also, I love to live in new places.

No commute

I refuse to waste hours of my life every week driving or riding to an office. Either I'll work close to home or I'll work at home.

I was surprised when I realized that this was all I needed from my life. I feel like I have more freedom in constructing my life than I had.

Why I want to work at Fog Creek

I'm applying for a summer internship at Fog Creek Software, a well-respected software company in NYC. I'm going to be interviewed by one of their developers next Tuesday, so I've been trying to anticipate the questions I will be asked and give them some thought. Tonight, I asked myself a simple but important question: "Why do you want to work at Fog Creek?"

First, I thought I wanted the experience. An internship at a reputable software company would look great on my résumé. I briefly considered whether I was in it for the office. Then, I thought that I wanted to prove to the world that I could build software, not just make little toys and read big books. However, I quickly realized the true source of my motivation: I want to work at Fog Creek to prove to myself that I can build software.

Until now, my most substantial project has been my work on OpenInkpot last summer. Assembling a cross-toolchain is highly technical work, but it's not a creative act. I didn't design the structure of the toolchain; I just put the pieces together.

I've tried to prepare myself for a career as a software developer by reading books on software structure and construction, but I know that's not enough. I won't know that I'm ready until I've built something real.

To become a software developer, I must develop software.

Where I have been

I haven't written an entry on this blog for about a month and a half. I stopped posting because I was unsatisfied with the quality of my entries. In a word, they sucked.

I realized this after listening to 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility!, Merlin Mann's and John Gruber's talk at the SxSW Interactive conference. Their advice to aspiring writers is simple: write well about topics which interest you.

Before now, I was putting frequency before quality, partially due to a foolish commitment to write one blog post a week during this year. I was writing pointless updates because I didn't have the time to create anything meaningful. Now I know that was a mistake. I am not a blogger; I'm a college student who enjoys writing.

Of course, this isn't the end of Welcome to Obscurity; it's the end of the shallow updates that have composed most of this blog's content for the last year. I will be writing infrequent, in-depth, polished entries about things about which I care.

Other news

Although I haven't been updating this blog lately, I have been blogging elsewhere. I started Life at the U to share my college experience with my family. It's been a huge hit within my social circle, so I've been updating frequently, sometimes multiple times per day.

New look, same direction

Well, I've finally ditched my custom template for a generic Blogger template. The reason? I wanted to use Blogger's native share toolbar, and my template didn't support it. I simply don't have the time to wade into the HTML and add the feature, so it's time to bid farewell to originality and let Blogger handle my layout. That is, until I find the time to switch to Tumblr.

In addition, I've disabled comments. This blog isn't meant to be a noisy discussion by a large group; it's a platform for me to talk about what I find interesting: myself, my projects, and other things. If you'd like to respond to one of my posts, feel free to by posting an entry on your blog or sending me an email at [redacted]. I'd love to hear from you!

I'm a GSoC student!

After months of hard work, I was chosen by the OpenInkpot organization to port OI to uClibc. I will be spending my summer reducing the memory OI consumes to allow it to run on e-readers with little memory. If you're curious about the Google Summer of Code, check out the official FAQ.

Picking an OSS project

The Google Summer of Code is rapidly approaching, and I'm looking to join up with an open-source software organization to do a summer project. I'll need to get up to speed in about a month, so I should probably pick a project in my current area of expertise: Javascript, PHP, ActionScript 3, Python, and C++. However, I can't resist looking at some projects that would require a new language. Here are a couple of the projects on which I'd like to work.

Linear window manager

As I wrote in my blog entry on the aging desktop metaphor, I'm sick and tired of touching my mouse to manage my windows. That's why I'd love to work on a new window manager for KDE, Gnome, or another desktop environment to create a new Con10uum-inspired interface. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if any of the orgs would be willing to spend one of their valuable students slots on this project.

Writing Haskell

I'm quite interested in learning about functional programming through Haskell, but I'm not sure if I can find a Haskell project that's basic enough for me to accomplish over the summer, but useful enough for Haskell to sponsor me. Perhaps I should give up on this one.

Working on the ES OS

I think the ES OS concept is highly interesting, and I now know C++, the language in which ES is written. However, this org's projects might still be too advanced for me. I really don't know where to start learning with a project this large.

Writing Python

If I can find a small, interesting project that I could do with Python, I'll try to join. However, the last "Python" project I tried to work on was actually written primarily in C. I'll have to be more careful.

If your OSS organization needs a volunteer over the summer, I encourage you to apply for the GSoC. If you're looking for a hard-working Python or Javascript developer, I'm your man.

Playing with SVG and Javascript

As a fan of ActionScript 3, Flash's vector-drawing scripting language, I've always been interested in the SVG standard. However, now that it's actually available to most of the web-browsing population, I have an excuse to learn more about it. I had stopped programming in AS3 because of the closed nature of the platform, its instability on Linux, and my inability to develop AS3 on Linux. However, I can now play with vector-drawing once again, thanks to the widespread adoption of SVG.

Anyway, this post is just a heads-up: I'm fiddling with SVG-scripting with Javascript, and I plan to write a tutorial about it soon. Thus far, I haven't found a basic tutorial on integrating HTML, SVG, and Javasript, and I hope my tutorial will remedy this perceived shortage. Of course, the tutorial is really just an excuse to play with Javascript and SVG, but I will continue to delude myself with words of altruism and selflessness. Helping people, that's what I'm doing...