On Career, Roller Coasters, and Surfing

When I was in university, I didn't give much thought to career. I knew what I wanted to do (write code), but beyond that, I was just riding the electrical engineering / computer science roller coaster wherever it took me. My idea of long term decision making was restricted to sending my resume to companies with cool sounding jobs, and eschewing the ones with terrible sounding ones. I gave no thought to improving myself for the next gig, or where my career would take me. I was very fatalistic about my career path -- what will happen will happen, so just go with it. Based on my interactions with the interns at work and talking to students at career fairs, I think a lot of college students are still this way. It is very easy because it takes little energy. But what if the track breaks?

When it comes to career, it's better to be a surfer and take control of your path as much is humanly possible when riding waves on the ocean of a career. Instead of just hanging on for dear life and seeing where the roller coaster track goes, you should direct your board across the wave. If the tide is out and the wave is going to crash on a reef, you should have the wherewithal to steer away from disaster, or end the ride on the current wave and paddle out for another. To do that, you need to keep your head up and see what's going on around you -- actually manage your own career.

Larry O'Brien has written many a column in Software Development Times on this very topic. This column made me stop what I was doing and read Peopleware, by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. DeMarco and Lister discuss how a company, and its managers should treat its employees. I agree with pretty much everything they state in the book. The corollary is, what is prescribed in the book is what every engineer should be looking for, if not demanding.

O'Brien's discussion on professional networking and career maintenance (Part 1, Part 2) was spot on as well. You're much more likely to find a gig through maintained professional connections than by submitting your resume to the human resources department of a corporation. Especially if that resume is filled with grammatical and spelling errors, or is just plain hard to read.

David Brady echoed O'Brien's opinions back in 2013, coming at it from a different angle in his posts on his blog, Heart, Mind and Code (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). He went a bit farther than O'Brien did, going into where your professional loyalties should lie.

There's no point in me regurgitating what they wrote, since you can -- and should -- click on the links and read the writings for yourself. Both O'Brien and Brady are much better writers than I, and will get you thinking about managing your career.

Picture This

Once upon a time, a man named David Brady published a blog called Insect Picture of the Day -- InsectPOD for short (I'd post a link, but the URL has long since expired. I'm two for two that way). On it, he would post a picture he took of an insect, would do some research, and write about it. It was fascinating stuff. When he requested user submissions, I was in, taking pictures of whatever insects I could find (a surprising variety), doing research of my own, and sending in the "good ones", hoping that he would publish them (which he did!). I learned a lot about phylum arthropoda in the process.

Thus was my introduction to macro photography.

As InsectPOD's update schedule waned due to life, so did my photo activity. It didn't help that in the meantime I had moved from a target-rich environment to one seemingly less so. Plus, you know, life. My trusty old first generation Canon Digital Rebel sat gathering dust. It's crappy old kit lens no longer actively frustrated me with its loose barrel fitment tolerances (I swear I can move it sideways enough at full extension for it to produce a noticeable tilt effect). Instead, it would mock me from the shelf.

Damned if you do. Damned if you don't.

Eventually the photography bug won. I switched teams and picked up a Nikon DSLR with its not-as-crappy-but-kinda-slow kit lenses and started shooting everything I could. Once I learned how best to shoot with the kit lenses, I even managed to take some decent photos. Armed with a 300 mm zoom (part of the kit), I learned to embrace telephoto photography. It wasn't all that different than macro! Your end goal is to fill most of the frame with your subject. Also, lenses are expensive and you always want more magnification. As an added bonus, there was less chance of getting stung or bit by your subject, or its compatriots.

But macro still called.

Macro with the kit portrait lens was less than fulfilling, and the zoom didn't focus on anything closer than nearly a meter away. Gear Acquisition Syndrome lost to economic reality, so that scrumptious looking 105 mm Nikkor glass was out of the question. The photography bug was on the verge of going back into hibernation when the Internet gave me the answer: extension tubes and lens reversal kits.

Extension tubes, unlike photo multipliers (doublers), pull the minimum focal distance in because the lens sits further from the sensor with no optical correction. In theory, I could put some tubes behind my 55 - 300 mm zoom and have a variable magnification macro lens (minus a stop or two in light gathering). And a very large on, at that.

What was more interesting, however, was the lens reversal kit. I had no idea that you could do such a thing with today's interconnected cameras and lenses. And I never thought about the consequence if you did so: really high magnification. All on the cheap. I was so in.

I've been playing with my tubes and reversal kit for a couple of days now. Early results are not share-worthy, but are good enough to feed the photography bug. One thing's for certain: with lens reversal, augmented lighting is a must. For now, I'm playing with the Pringle's can solution, but ring flashes aren't too expensive, so I will probably end up going that route. Also, the reversal ring is never coming off my 18 - 55 mm portrait lens. Not by choice. It's just really stuck. So maybe a replacement is in order? Damn you GAS! *shakes fist*