Do What You Love, With People You Love

That’s my simple recipe for finding joy in showing up to work every day. It comes from a few core values I try to live by: be creative, deliver value, and be a good human.

What I Love Doing

I love the act of creating things. It’s that simple. I dream up fictional stories and worlds, orchestrate music with instruments and vocals, concoct cocktails and cuisine, forge pieces of art, and improv role playing games with my kids and friends. Oh, I almost forgot, I also construct software.

Yes, I love creating software. Especially web applications. I enjoy being involved in every stage of the SDLC (Software Delivery Life Cycle), the full creative arc from concept to deployment.

Who I Love Doing It With

The people I work with make or break the experience. My favorite teammates are empathetic, thoughtful, creative, analytical, diverse, collaborative, and just a bit quirky.

How This Led Me to the Ruby Community

This year, my therapist challenged me to think about how my personal values align with my work. As I explored the job market, I found myself pulled toward two areas:

First, a return to UX and Accessibility, an homage to my first role contributing to a web application as a UX Developer at PR Newswire over a decade ago.

Second, I stumbled into the Ruby community. Just like UXers, Rubyists are my kind of quirky. Both communities share something special: they align deeply with my values.

Shared Values

Consider these quotes:

“Design for humans, not users.”
“Matz is nice, so we are nice.”
“Delight is in the details.”
“Optimized for developer happiness.”
“Don’t make me think.”
“There’s more than one way to do it.”
“Make it work for everyone.”
“Happy developers make better software.”

Can you tell which come from UX and which from Ruby? They alternate UX, Ruby, UX, Ruby. What’s the commonality? Positivity, inclusion, happiness, and humanity.

Moving Forward

As I evolve from a specialist Front-End Engineer into a Full-Stack Engineer, one who can thoughtfully integrate AI, Ruby on Rails feels like the right first framework.

To the organizers and attendees of Rocky Mountain Ruby, thank you for embodying everything I hoped your community would be. The talks, the conversations, and the energy reminded me that the future of software doesn’t have to be soullessly automated.

It can, and should, be built by humans with heart, using technology to make the world a better place.

One last shout out. Thank you, Angelo, for sponsoring me to go.

Do what you love, with people you love.