Leaving My Job to Do What I Love

A lot can change in a year's time. A year ago I had just finished my undergrad in CS and decided to take a month off before plunging into the corporate world. I realized how valuable this time was after beginning to string together a proof of concept for my idea around two weeks before graduation. So I got to work and used the several weeks to start pursuing this complex idea that I had for my web app and began scouring StackOverflow and other random sites for tutorials on django. Banging away at my keyboard, I began doing some of my first significant web development and began to understand the appeal and satisfaction that comes with making something great to put into people's hands.


A year has gone by and the long struggle of trying to make time to work on a promising side project and the insatiable hunger to spend every moment while not working a 40 hr/week job in embedded development has led me to pursue web development full on. Fittingly, I've decided to leave my job to pursue other projects and ideas that I'm passionate about. It's been my dream for quite some time for me to be able to pursue an idea that I enjoy working on and has the potential to impact people on a daily basis. I'm not sure at the moment where I'll be in the future but I know what I want to be doing.


As cliche as it may sound, I think the inspirational note that is left on all new Apple employees' desks says it best:
"There's work and there's your life's work. The kind of work that has your fingerprints all over it. The kind of work that you'd never compromise on. That you'd sacrifice a weekend for. People don't come here to play it safe. They come here to swim in the deep end. They want their work to add up to something. Something big."


Without a doubt, I've learned a great deal in the past year. I've become somewhat familiar with the startup scene, venture capital (what it is and how it actually works), and really learning how to consolidate the description of an idea down to something that people can understand (and reading Hacker News is always a plus). I'm not quite as naive as the one year ago me but certainly am still as optimistic and as driven.


There's so much more that I could talk about which has happened in the past year but I'll leave some of that for another post.


Be focused. Be faithful.


-cp