Passionate about People!

Over the last couple of weeks I have had time to observe many aspects of myself and of the development community.

One of the epiphanies I had was that I am passionate about people more than coding. I love to mentor other developers. I love to mentor future development managers. I love to coach others about Agile practices.

The reward I get is not in them simply listening to me. It is that magical moment when the light bulbs go off on a new concept or when they come up with an outstanding solution to a problem. I love when people accomplish things. Trust me people don’t come up with these ideas because of me, all I simply do is trim the forest so they can see the trees. They are brilliant in their own right.

Don’t get me wrong I still love to code but I love to elucidate concepts to others even more. On top of that I care about people to much to the point that I can’t sleep some time. You see I am the kind of person who wants everyone to get along. I know, I know that is not always possible but I will try my best to create an atmosphere where everyone can at least be heard and talk through their issues with one another. If I upset someone I will usually seek them out and find out what I did to upset them. If I don’t, I usually end up decomposing the altercation to some resolution that will insure it doesn’t happen with anyone else.

Why am I taking to the time to write this all down? Well for two reasons:

1. I want to make sure I reflect on this in the future.
2. Is this issue concerning the perception of emotion when conveying information in a written format. i.e. blogs, mailing list etc. Emoticons are a thin medium to convey emotion over these channels but personalities overall are usually lost or misunderstood. With the exception of meeting me in person you have no idea what my true demeanor is. While I love to mentor other I usually do it with a lot of humorous satire. My goal is to get you to smile first and learn second. If you had just met me for the first time you could mistake the satire as literal sarcasm and think I am demeaning you or others.

I just believe that a lot of the rhetoric that is exchanged with other peers within our community can be brought down if we truly took the time to learn each other’s true personality. Or at the least take a moment to sit back and reflect on the question, “Is what I am interpreting truly what this person is meaning to convey?” If you are unsure, ask!  A majority of the time people just didn’t think what they had written would be taken in the way you perceived it.