"Your life is gonna be changed forever!"

I had the dream to go to Russia for a year, to live there and to learn Russian. I was so passionate about the idea... A friend and I were determined to go there, whatever the price or sacrifice would be.

Five years ago, we actually decided to quit our jobs and the comfort of our daily life to go for a year in Siberia. The officer at the Russian consulate, blew his stamp, and then told us with a thick Russian accent : "Your life is gonna be changed forever!". The stamp did a big SLAM! when it fell on the visa.

That trip, indeed, changed my life in a lot of ways. 

I put a lot of energy and passion into that trip, and after that year I felt that I was missing something. I had finally done what I really wanted to do. So I drifted without a clear goal for few years. I had a couple of passions, but no one with the same kind of intensity.

Few months ago, I was looking at the Linkedin  profile of one of my college's friend, he is doing a job that I was envying, the kind of job I always dreamed to do back then : a very technical, low level  code kind of job.

In college I was the C guy,  playing with kernel code, feeling good about reading memory dumps, eventually, my career took a very different path than his. I don't regret the choices I made, I have learned a lot of good things and had the chance to work with a lot of very professional and skilled programmers, business analysts and managers.

However, I felt that I really need to do something to put me back on track. I felt the need to improve myself and refresh my skills, to keep pushing up and aiming high. I felt the Passion coming back. I relearned to love what I do. 

I started to read a lot of IT books (many from The Pragmatic Bookshelf). From that moment I have read at least a book every week. At the same time I started to read a lot of IT related feeds using Google Reader, and share posts to my friends. I enjoy it! 

But I have the feeling that it's a lot of reading with not enough of doing...

This weekend I have read The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler : Creating a remarkable career in software development. I read through pages like crazy. Every chapter was flying by. The book is focused on software development, but I really think it could be applied to other fields. It was really motivating for me. 

After reading the second part (Marketing... Not Just for Suits),  I just went online and bought a domain name, codingtony.com. 

Today I started to write this blog. It will move me out of my comfort zone.  I hope it will help me to start to do stuff!

On this blog, I will share links, thoughts on software development, tricks and other stuff from /dev/random

Keep motivated! May the Passion be with you :)