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"You've got to find what you love... And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle." -- Steve Jobs


Concretely, go further with programming and see if you like it: see if it's hard not to think about the things that could be built, and the hard part is picking a single thing to work on; if new tools and technologies or ways to do the work better are interesting even if you're not sure where you'd use them yet; if you can see yourself occasionally building stuff for fun.

Building shippable software will still be maddening when you're almost done but for one fiddly piece of code that behaves wrong and you can't explain why. The clever and visible and intrinsically exciting stuff will only be a small part of the larger product. Much of what you do will sound interesting to nobody (maybe not even fellow techies).

But if there's fun there, it's a huge help getting past all that and finding the whole exercise worth it nonetheless.

Relatedly, I don't think you should necessarily cut yourself off after introductory Rails or Python classes; as long as you're having fun, you're probably learning something, too.

And work on subject matter you care about--you seem to have a bit of room to do what you want, and liking the goal to which you're applying your skills is huge.




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