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Ask HN: How should I pursue my passion?
Dear HN,
As a community of creative, passionate, and ambitious people, I have a question for HN.
I am at an interesting point in life. I am 25 yrs. old, and I am a programmer. I know what I want to pursue, but I don't know how to do it. I have tried. I saved up money and quit my job 2 months ago to pursue my passion. I am going to move to a different city in a few months anyway, so that decision was low risk and easy to make.
My "passion" has many sides. I love 2d/3d real-time graphics. I also love programming language design. I am deeply devoted to the Scheme programming language, and I love using it to construct 2d/3d worlds which I can interact with. I like games, and obviously I should be working with games, but I definitely don't enjoy game programming (game logic, AI, etc.).
My love for programming language design leads me to compilers, syntactual abstraction, macro transformers, etc. I believe that graphics programming is currently bulky and complicated, and I would like to see more languages compiling itself into vertex/geometry/fragment shaders, scene graphs, etc.
It's been 2 months. I have found that I haven't even been able to work on the things I'm interested in - I have to make products that sell, right? I've been developing an iPhone game, and 95% of the work has been making 3d models, putting graphics together, marketing, integrating audio, developing a menu system, integrating fonts, and building the actual game logic.
It's a struggle. I want to do research, and I think I'd be good at it. But I have to make money. It's either one or the other, I can't possibly do both at the same time, unless I get paid to do the research I want to do. I'm going to finish my iPhone game, but I doubt I'll make much off it. From here, my options are, in order of preference:
* Work on a graphics engine and do the interesting work. License it and sell it for something like $100/license.
* Find contracting work to do graphics programming for games.
* Look for part-time contracting work and work on the interesting stuff on the side.
* Get a normal full-time programming job and try to be satisfied.
These are in order of "passion <=> practicality". The problem is that there's a linear correspondence to "lack of money <=> money".
With all that said, I truly do believe that if I was somehow funded for a few years, my passionate work would truly pay off and I could start making money off of it. It's a bootstrapping problem.
I would also love to meet people with my interests and/or passion. I know you are out there, those who can either supplement or complement me with the same or different talents, and I want to be shaped and inspired by you.
I hope this doesn't sound like I'm whining. I think it's extremely important that you figure out how to do what you LOVE in life, even if it takes a long time to build up to it. I'm not looking for quick solutions, I just want to know how I can build up to it. Any advice?
You can see the work that I've been doing here: http://jlongster.com/blog/
- maxklein 17y agoWell, if you're interested in programming 2d running games like Mario or Canabalt with cocos2d, I'd be interested in a partnership. I have a powerful cross-promotion network to push any game. Also have some funds for purchasing graphics, and have hands for manual labour. I think the side-scroller market is a good area to be in in games.
- jlongster 17y agoI would definitely be interested. Sending you an email now.
- nzmsv 17y agoThere might also be the option of going to graduate school and working on graphics. A language for geometry/scene graphs sounds like a plausible research project.
- tjic 17y agoIMO, your passion is far too broad. You like graphics, programming language design, research, and three other things. To be brutal, it sounds like what you're in love with is noodling around, with no particular deliverable. As Jobs said "real artists ship". My two pieces of advice: 1) keep honing your ideas until you've got something that is: * bounded * achievable * of interest to someone else ...then try to develop and productize that 2) in the mean time, keep the lights on and Ramen cooking by doing some contract work. It's a challenge to keep booked up 40 hrs/week, even if you're trying, so you shouldn't have trouble keeping it down to 20 hrs/week, and working on your passion in the other 20-40.
- jlongster 17y agoThanks. I completely agree. I have downplayed the option of part-time contract work for some reason. That's probably the best fit fore my life right now. Thanks to everyone else as well, it's great to get feedback. I won't respond to everyone's post, but it's all good ideas. I mainly want to contribute valuable work to the field of CS, so doing either part-time work or graduate school is good for now.