UNTITLED

Inspiration

Sep 14, 2016

What motivates you?

Inspiration is what gets you up in the morning. It’s that feeling where you can’t wait to pound out those .apply’s and write that chrome extension you’ve been meaning to finish. What gets you through the day?

Recently after finishing a major in Computer Science, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I should spend my time, and why I do what I do (that being mainly web development these days). Although I finished my major fall semester, I still had one last class before graduating, so I decided to try to work throughout the semester instead of taking it easy. Though my friends may argue that my sitting around in sweats crushing some carefully crafted CoffeeScript and getting to work with some truly incredible people may be a walk in the park compared to their once-every-other-week problem sets, it was different than anything I’ve ever experienced. There were no rules, everyone was watching your every semicolon (but not really because CoffeeScript), and more importantly we were all working together. It might sound strange, but you’ve never felt the pain of working on a team until you’ve done a git merge master, run git status, and seen more red than Freddie Krueger on Elm Street. After a while I got into the rhythm, writing specs for features and bugs, and throwing together angular directives with JST templates, and it started making a little more sense.

But why was I doing it? Obviously there’s the axiomatic generalization that it’s my job, but, I had to ask myself, why did I pick this job? Was it because I was comfortable with front-end development? Or maybe because I’m not fit for a role in algorithms development, as it’s been deemed by previous potential employers (cough all of silicon valley cough). After I thought about it for a bit, all the while still working and chatting with my co-workers over slack or reviewing PR’s on GitHub, I came to realize that it’s not the money, it’s not the work, and it’s not even my wonderful peers– it’s the chance to make a difference, and to sculpt the virtual landscape of our future. It may seem overtly self-centered and egocentric, but I dare say you have to be.

After all, what else wakes you up more than the satisfaction of the noumenon and anticipation of what lies in store for tomorrow

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