Geek Building The Bridge Part 2

I’ve been thinking about this for quite a while. I have this identity dilema, in particular with identity association. There’s some institution I can associate with but there are other which I felt related to but difficult to associate with. A real example can be found within today’s ILC (Indonesia Linux Conference) 2007 event. Who am I? What institution I should associate myself with? There’s this KPLI (Linux User Group Indonesia) Jogja where I should have been a member of, though never give much of a value to. There’s also ubuntu jogja/id where the only relation to me is that I’m using K/ubuntu on my laptop :D. Luckily, there’s actually one thing I can clearly associate myself with. That would be: id-anime. Thus, that’s just what I wrote on the presence list of ILC 2007 this morning. To be exact: KPLI Jogja/id-anime

Recent “you aren’t cut out to be developer” memes, especially the one posted by Andry here, has questioned my faith again. I love his: when all we got is hammer then all problems will look like nails. Yes, being a fanbois or evangelist might cost us objective perspectives. However, evangelists and fanbois are ones who push our technology beyond its limit, thus resulting in new features and bug fixes.

On yet another side, we can see some sort of trend in IT vacancies. There are a good number of technology spesific demand of IT worker, such as: Crystal Report, Struts, DHTML script, etc.

On my side, I grew up with BASIC, Pascal, and then Delphi. I started PHP somewhere
during college. My first real job assigned me to deal with Delphi
again. And one year later back to PHP on web development. Then I did
some “better” javascript — learned closure, and other better javascript
practices — not just onmouseclick anymore. Mixed it with XHR, and XUL
when I started falling in love with Firefox.

I’ve also fell in love with Qt/KDE. I was astounished by a member of
KOffice developer which was 23 years old when I’m reading it some years
ago. It wasn’t Ariya Hidayat. I knew Mas Ariya some times later when I
was checking out the about box on KWord. In short, these stuff and
people are what I’ve been looked up to :). And then, these recent month
– started when I moved to Research and Development department — I started coding in Java (and minor C++, out of Qt/KDE context).

My yet simple history of learning programming languages, Andry’s post, and the trend of vacancies requirement in technology context are sides. We can choose on of them but we can’t have all. This is where my confusion come in place. We are limited with time and brain capacity (please excludes geniuses here), yet we have to be ready to jump into the IT worker market. Some employers tend to choose wild bullets so they can shoot right away. While others don’t mind to have gun powder to power their cannon with. Unfortunately, the later is hard to be found. What we tend to find here is the former.

Well, I guess I need to grow up and pursue wisdom. I think it’ll be a simple problem, once I can tame my ego :D. However, let’s not spoil the fun. I’m sure some of you have the exact or similar issue. Tell me what you think about it.

Picture note:
Focus Group Discussion on KPLI: Business and Legality Issue, during ILC 2007. I’m wearing red t-shirt. Credits to Yan Arief.

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