I’ve often declined to answer to this question when I am asked. But this time I’m going to brief about my determination.
For those who don’t know when I leaved, it was in June of last year. I made it public during Microsoft’s CodeCamp in “El Rocío” (Spain). At that time, I was firmly resolved to give this up. Some people reasoned it was due not to be chosen for a summer internship in Redmond, in Microsoft’s headquarters, but they are all wrong. There are a variety of reasons that made my mind up. In fact, I can count up to four reasons.
- My academic performance dropped too low. I was used to achieving great results in University, but since I joined DotNetClubs I started to dismiss my academic performance and got more interested about what are the hot new technologies from Microsoft. The result: I just passed one exam… too bad man.
- I developed a moronic coding style. This was really bad, because I used to write low-quality unmaintainable code. In the rock bottom, I used try-catch blocks as conditional statements instead of writing something like: if(dictionary.ContainsKey()) {…} else {…}. I also started to think in high-level, forgetting completely what was going down below. Abstractions are necessary, but we should not forget about Spolsky noted about them.
About that time, I relied on technology (know how to use something) too much rather than knowing how to build something.
- I became one of those dogmatic developers who call “useless crap” anything that is not from Microsoft or one of its partners. And that’s not good because I was not aware of programming languages like Perl, Haskell or Prolog, neither LaTeX as a word processor. I don’t like people who blame what they don’t know and I was becoming one of them.
- Trends and interests in the DotNetClub Sevilla became too different from mines. XBox360, XNA, Game developments and those things are not what I’m interested in learning. Some might argue that I could have started another thread/branch/whatever but little people share my interests, at least, in my university. I’d better leave off.
I could tell you more reasons, but I think that four is enough. If you don’t like what you are doing: stop doing it!
Half a year later, I feel I did the right choice. I’ve passed two subjects in the first semester; there are a huge improvement in my code, designs and specs; I’m using a few operative systems such as Windows XP (work), Windows Vista (sometimes, for Outlook and a little more. I don’t like Google Calendar ;) and a flavor of Linux known as Kubuntu (home use and university tasks).
It’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock ‘n’ roll ;)
