Real Life Happens

That's what I heard from manyoso lately and he was damn right. This indeed happens and I see I'm not the one. Well, my day this week consisted of 16 hours and if I substract two hours I spend to have some food and read my mail I'll get same 14 working hours as geiseri had.

But I'm having that since February and I can't see the way to avoid this in the next 6 months too so I should live with that. But there's one Cicero's statement that consoles myself. He said once that if we avoid the weight of cares then we miss the prowess. And indeed what would I have done and what kind of man would I be without my cares ;)

Speaking about cares, I had plenty of them recently. Just to mention the first Ruby/Rails meetup I and my fellow Anton organized here in Mykolayiv. The cool thing is that event was financed by the company I work for now and we managed to rent the good conference hall and gather the most interesting people there.

Anton did extremely well at organizing so my job was only to enjoy and educate people who came to this event. Hopefuly I did it not so bad ;) I was speaking on Ruby and Rails, showed live demos writing some real Ruby and Rails code and I was overwhelmed with questions during the whole event. I thought 3 hours would be enough and I was surprised to be proven wrong :) Four hours the people tortured me asking more and more (especially about Ruby language itself) and then after the event was finished they were continuing torturing me in the bar nearby till late evening :)

As far as I can see, people who work in software development industry in my town are really interested in something new and innovative. This is nothing surprising.

What's more surprising that engineers who worked in the industry at least for two years are more interested in technologies than students in my university. I've been working at the university for four years and I can see this tendency growing in last two years. Most CS students pick one thing they think will bring them money and get stuck (no it's not Java, here in Ukraine we all like Delphi). On their second year they already know (or think they already know) how to program in Delphi/ObjectPascal/whatever and stop listening to their teachers. Of course they miss algorithms, parsing theory, OO programming modelling and lots, lots of really necessary things including two Unix courses we have in our university. Of course they don't hear me telling them about the beauty of Unix, Ruby, whatever else.

And I now kinda enjoy when I see same people to have interest in all those things they missed at the university after spending a couple of years doing real life work. Why does that happen? Only recently I found out an answer. The very simple answer. Money is the answer.

Typical ukrainian student grows in the environment where he constantly lacks money. And after they are able to develop another cool accounting application in Delphi they find out they already can earn quite a lot of money. In fact, that amount can be already bigger their teachers get from the university. This convinces them the university teachers are worthless and they don't believe in their authority anymore. Heh.

Of course thereafter they grow, they start think more about their profession, maybe read blogs like this one (I was shown this several days ago). And their interest level actually starts growing and they start growing themselves at the same time. I wish our students looked one step further or just believed their teachers.

Hmm, why am I writing all that? Maybe I'm just ranting. But maybe that's just my own discourse on duties. Do not neglect your duties, even if they sound wrong if you're student and think the world domination is one step ahead. Just believe me, the real life happens and you will not have enough time to educate yourself after the university. I know it. Don't repeat my mistakes. I know how hard is now to extract just two hours from your daily schedule to learn new language or to read new book.

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