Loving What You Do

I went to a presentation on IronRuby by John Lam and Scott Hanselman last night.

John was in Portland, Oregon, giving a presentation at the civic center and made time in his schedule to make another presentation for the Portland Area Dot Net Users Group.

John works for Microsoft in building 41; this means that John knows nothing about the Portland, Oregon area. The reason I mention this because John's ride had complications in locating the presentation site and was a bit late.

While the group was waiting for John to arrive, Scott entertained us by answering or not answering questions, as well as putting on a demonstration of some of the work that he had done in Ruby recently.

Scott's presenting skills are well worth the price of admission; in this case it was free, but it was still worth the time. Scott is full of energy and talks about a thousand miles an hour and took other questions as he was pondering and researching another question. And he actually did a pretty good job of multi-task answering.

John arrived and immediately heckled Scott as if Scott were a bad comedian. And then a quick bantering began about how a computer geek could get lost in the day and age of GPSes. The two acted like they have been friends for eons.

After a brief intermission in order to give John time to set up his computer [an Apple MacBook by the way] and presentation, we were off and running.

The energy that John brought about the product that he was helping develop was incredible.

The day of a computer geek being trapped in a dark room with a computer and geekfood [pizza, Asian food, some high caffeine beverage, and/or anything out of a vending machine] and no human contact are gone. Geekfood is still in, but today's geek must be able to group/customer face, which means speaking to people is a must.

John talked about the good, the bad and the ugly about IronRuby. He did it with such vigor that you could tell that he was not just working for a paycheck. He truly loves what he does; coding and talking about what he does [obviously not giving away any trade secrets].

It is very refreshing to see a couple of individuals who are making the most of work-life by loving what they do.

Like I have said before, if you have to work to make a living, you might as well get paid to do something that you love to do.

Make someone's day and perform a random act of kindness. It could be as simple as displaying to the world that you love what you do.