Evidently it is still possible, in this age of instant knowledge, to teach yourself something new.
Remember when you first got into IT or MIS or whatever programming language you started on and the power you felt when you got some OS to run or "hello world" showed up on screen or you got a line of text to blink? What happened to you? Do you still get that excited?
Encouraging the next generation to follow us means we need to remember the good old days and the excitement we felt. Personally I don't get that same feeling from Websphere but if you do good for you.
I used to say give me a day with any system and I will figure out enough to make it work for me. In time I could fill in the details and more knowledge. Now that I am older, evidently it takes me a few more days than it used to in my prime. To be fair systems are much more complex than they used to be. I know more now and it makes it harder to "just learn on the fly" when you can think of some many permutations of what you are trying to do.
So it was with great happiness I left the client site tonight completing part of a project doing something I haven't done before and it was really cool, again. For the first time in a long time, I got to feel like I did in the early days. It's a minor thing, perhaps to some, and even looking at it for face value it's a minor accomplishment but it's just great to every once in a while do something new and renew the enjoyment of why I chose to hang out with the technology world and not the accounting profession.
So go ahead teach, yourself something new and stay forever young.
Remember when you first got into IT or MIS or whatever programming language you started on and the power you felt when you got some OS to run or "hello world" showed up on screen or you got a line of text to blink? What happened to you? Do you still get that excited?
Encouraging the next generation to follow us means we need to remember the good old days and the excitement we felt. Personally I don't get that same feeling from Websphere but if you do good for you.
I used to say give me a day with any system and I will figure out enough to make it work for me. In time I could fill in the details and more knowledge. Now that I am older, evidently it takes me a few more days than it used to in my prime. To be fair systems are much more complex than they used to be. I know more now and it makes it harder to "just learn on the fly" when you can think of some many permutations of what you are trying to do.
So it was with great happiness I left the client site tonight completing part of a project doing something I haven't done before and it was really cool, again. For the first time in a long time, I got to feel like I did in the early days. It's a minor thing, perhaps to some, and even looking at it for face value it's a minor accomplishment but it's just great to every once in a while do something new and renew the enjoyment of why I chose to hang out with the technology world and not the accounting profession.
So go ahead teach, yourself something new and stay forever young.
Funny, I was just thinking of learning accounting. :)
ReplyDeleteHappy Chanukah!
Keith, I surely agree with you, I suspect that day never passes without me learning something new ( or, in some cases, re-learning things that I'd forgotten I knew as per today's blog post ).
ReplyDeleteOne of the many benefits of working for IBM is being able to re-invent oneself, in terms of skills, specialisms (sic) and job roles.
I started with AS/400s back in 1992, moved into thin clients in the late 90s, switching into Java, Unix and WebSphere in the early noughties, to get where I am today :-)
Thanks for the post. May you keep learning forever ... and a day.