What are you passionate about?
Thu, Feb 26, 2015I have recently been reading the book entitled Talk Like TED Carmine Gallo which promises to bestow the virtues of great public speaking upon all who read it. Early on in the book there is a rather salient point that got me thinking, a point that starts with a simple question, “What are you passionate about”. Now there are quite a few things I am passionate about but in the context of Software Engineering, my chosen career path, it is something that underpins all the great projects that over time I have really enjoyed working on. What is it? Data.
I am passionate about data, specifically the conclusions you can draw from it. This is not to say the actual gathering of data, although that can be quite interesting in itself: constructing tools and processes as you squirrel away the nuts of information that together paint a picture that no one individual data point can allude to. I am more passionate about the ‘Wheres Wally’ dance: the finding of that little something you’ve been looking for in a sea of noise, the epiphany, the moment, the unveiling. The answer to the puzzle that is something you intrinsically know is just outside your grasp and that with the data, that collection of measurements and information, the answer will magically appear. The puzzle that is made up of a thousand pieces and by putting them all together it becomes clear. That is what I’m passionate about. I guess my career has always followed that route of problem solving.
Software Engineering is a great field to be in if you enjoy problem solving: you get to create a solution based upon parts constructed with only your imagination, a programming language, and your favourite text editor. In my experience, the first solution you produce is often not quite what you were looking for, and the itch remains. You continue to iterate, introduce bugs, fix bugs, thinking of new and novel ways to answer your initial questions and finally you have something that not only works, it satisfies that itch. When you employ this process to scratch a larger itch, a higher-level more abstract problem that requires the gathering and analysis of data I find there is satisfaction from the initial problem solving during development plus the benefit of discovering that pattern or snippet of information that maybe you only thought was there before but now is proven with the data. Maybe this explains why I have an affinity with Pervasive Computing and, in its latest incarnation as a buzz word - Internet of Things (IoT). The topic of Data Inference, that is what I really enjoy.
I’ve gathered much data over the years: email achives and usage data, energy monitoring and the subsequent discovery of inefficient appliances, health data with Fitbit and Garmin or lifestyle monitoring with Slogger, it can all be combined to do wonderful things. But there is a tendancy to gather data just of the sake of it and I have certainly been guilty of that but I am starting to take a step back and trust the data more - to make informed decisions based upon it - so lets see how that goes this year. Big data is definately here, but the more important point everyone should be asking is “What do we do with all that data and how can it benefit humanity?”.