When I was a teenager, my main mode of social interaction was paper-and-pencil role playing games. Among my favorite was Vampire: The Masquerade, which (theoretically, anyway) centered around this idea of clutching to humanity, passion, and life as an undead creature. One of the innovations in the system was alternative moral codes, called “paths” — basically, the metaphysics of the game were adjusted so that the vampire characters of the story didn’t have to cling to humanity necessarily, but certain belief systems could be strong enough to maintain them, as well. One of these was called “Path of Power and the Inner Voice”, a moral code intended for villains which basically mandated running around and doing what you wanted to do and to Hell with everyone else. Among my group of gamer friends, this path became known as “Path of What I Was Going To Do Anyway”.
Although that’s not a moral code I’m particularly a fan of, it occurred to me today while talking to Brian that what I’ve been searching for is “Career of What I Was Going To Do Anyway”. Since leaving college, I’ve spent my time searching for some mode of living that will both sustain me in the life style I’m accustomed to and allow me to do the kinds of things that I enjoy doing — contributing to a community, problem solving, engaging people in conversation, and challenging complacency and pushing the status quo. This is part of the reason I’ve spun off the Smokejumper Training for Groovy and Grails: I see the Grails don’t-remake-it-just-make-it-easy paradigm as a challenge to the complacency and status quo of both the Java and the PHP/Ruby world, so I’d like to engage people in conversation and do problem solving through the Grails training. And having a Grails training course should make Grails adoption more palatable to business — they should know they don’t have to figure out how to use this system all on their own, and they can have their people learn from someone already experienced with the technology. Although it may not be as visible as Autobase or BackGroundThread, I’m hopeful that this push into business will be a major contribution to the community.
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