In March I started studying, via distance education, a Graduate Certificate of Systems Development with Charles Sturt University. The Graduate Certificate is made up of 4 units which can count towards the full Masters course (which I plan on continuing with - I figured it would be safer to aim for something achievable first, and seeing if I still liked studying enough to commit a few years to it!) Charles Sturt University has a great reputation for its distance education, but the reason I signed up was that it works hand-in-hand with industry so you achieve the Masters and industry certification...

Recently my boss said something like: There are two types of developers - ones that are into their tools, and those that just use the tools. You don't need to be the first type to get the job done. With regards to most of the programs I use, I'm the first type (and proud of it). However there's some things I have no desire to get into, and would rather just use; DOS batch files, Oracle TNSNAMES.ORA configuration, HTML help authoring, to name a few. That one little quote also touched on a tendency that I have to spend too much time fiddling...

Louis over at lbrandy has a funny-yet-serious post on "Demotivating a (Good) Programmer" (found via Delicious popular links). Here's my favorite bit: Developers hate three things, above all else, in increasing order of painfulness… Working on stuff that is easyWorking on stuff that is tangentialWorking on stuff that no one will use These are the three deadliest of deadly sins in the development world. Especially number three. Nothing will suck the life out of programmer faster than working on something he is certain no one will ever use. I don't know about you, but I totally agree with number 3. I can still remember...

I've been following Jason Franks' blog on GeeksWithBlogs and his recent theories on developers and big companies in "Dev.Culture" got me thinking. Here's two of the bits that stand out in his post: We want to build new things, we want to make an impact...and we don't _need_ tens of millions of dollars to accomplish anything. In software, we can built anything we imagine from nothing but keywords and logic...The story of the hero developer is never about a dude who joined a big company and worked his way up from the mailroom; it's about the guy who founded a company that grew...