About a month ago, I felt myself entering one of those periods in my life where I had to face my self-doubt and challenge my complacency.  It wasn’t the first time I’ve been challenged with this, and by far will not be the last.  Each time I am reminded how important it is to be passionate about what it is I do and how vital it is to keep learning, because new learning and constant challenge breathes life into what can quickly become a monotonous and stagnant career.

In the past, I have been asked why I try to learn so many things in my time away from my day job, and why I don’t put all that extra time into what I do at my day job.  Here is the answer: that is the one way road to becoming burnt out or complacent.  The constant challenge of learning new technologies and practices keeps me on my toes, and also opens my eyes to what software developers outside my shop are doing.  This constant evolution of my skill set also makes me hold my code and the code of others to a higher standard.

I am a .NET developer now, but that does not necessarily mean that’s all I will ever be.  I am a Software Developer first, my focus in .NET is merely the current “tool for the job.”  If I was told tomorrow that everything was being converted to Ruby on Rails, I’d jump on it in a heartbeat.  I cannot, and will not, limit myself.  That being said, as a .NET developer, I do not limit myself to just what Microsoft says or what tools Microsoft releases.  I use the best tools for the job, when I have a choice in the matter.  If I were a Java developer, my perspective on this would not be any different: not all of the tools come from Sun, and the ones that do may not necessarily be the best for the task at hand.

I do a lot of work in my personal time, some evenings I come home from a day of programming to do more programming.  Some of it goes unfinished, but I still learn from it.  Some of them are not meant to be “finished,” as they are just conceptual projects to help me learn and understand something new.  To be perfectly honest, I would rather be doing some of my personal projects for clients, so there would actually be some sort of deployment strategy involved, and so my work would actually mean something.  As I am still a young developer, this is an area I’m not too terribly experienced with, but would like to be.

This year my focus is on networking, and getting out to participate in workshops, conferences, and the like as much as possible.  This has been my weak area so far, because I don’t live in one of the bigger cities and have access to a much smaller pool of developers (in fact, I hardly know more than those in my own office).  This is definitely something I’m looking to change, and learn all sorts of new things in the process.