I seldom discover new areas in my professional career that I find more interesting than writing code, doing community work, write blogposts or simply do cut-to-chase work. I don’t like politics, I don’t like beauracy, I don’t care for leadership or anything in that ballpark. In my book we are all equal to do, create, share and make progress. And that’s what I really try to do all the time. I love working and my passion for what I do can’t be measured on any known scale. When you are truly commited to what you do it doesn’t matter what other people think, say or do. You have your game on, you’re on the grind and do what it takes to reach the goals of whatever journey you have set onto.
I will embark on a new journey, starting next year (2013), and at the end of it, I hope to become very good at what it hopes it gives me. I remember and still experience my hunger for becoming a better programmer, by passion, and I have absolutely no intention of letting that go. But lately I have found out that, almost everytime I do a File > New > Project, I think about the business values of the code I am about to write. So much code and so many good projects have been thrown out, good ideas, because I have had no clue about which customers segments, channels or partnerships I needed for the project to really fly.
As a developer we all know the feeling of creating nice things, but very rarely any of us ever talk or have a sense about how to make our nice things into a business. I want to be very good at that. Turning good projects into valuable businesses! It might seem very straight forward…like writing code…but like writing code…it’s hard and challenging work. There are plenty of great and outstanding developers out there, but there are very few developers who knows anything about driving a business forward, creating value, defining cost structures and revenue streams, or how to set up key partnerships. Becoming good at anything in life, I believe, takes a lot of sacrifice and probably a lot of failure. I also believe that developers need to transform themselves into more business-wise people, so they know how to discuss value and revenue inside a company or within a specific domain.
So this years blogposts will be a lot more about creating value instead of only creating code. I will stay very loyal to the future Microsofts platform and focus only on Windows/Phone and Azure. Furthermore, I will be writing about physcial businesses and how we can learn from them in the face of virtualism. From there on I will find projects/solutions and offer my insights on how to create the value, models and so on.
In the beginning you might laugh, critize me and my findings poor, but I hope, with your help, that I can grow into be a more mature and experienced technical/business evangelist :)
Have a great 2013!