One of my deeply held beliefs is that there is no such thing as reincarnation. We have been given one chance to live and we have to get it "right" the first time itself. What this boils down to is that I need to accomplish my goal of changing the world for the better before I run out of steam or time.
Week in review
A rut is a grave with smaller dimension
If I were to sit down and review my past week, or for that matter my past 3 months, I don't think I have learned or worked on anything that will help me in reaching my ultimate goal. The other worrying thing is that I have fallen into a rut. I am not being pushed to learn something new and this is really dangerous to my intelligence. It is not correct to infer that my job is boring. There are enough challenges there. However, the time for working on the challenges remains just out of reach. Most of my time gets taken up by the mundane tasks at work.
On the other hand, it is possible that I am putting too much expectation into my work. What I mean is that I might be expecting my work to provide me with the opportunity to learn new things, instead of taking the onus of creating new lessons myself.
When I look back to the year 2004, when I got my first job, I had
learned a lot of technologies there . And I applied whatever I had
learned to whatever I was working on. Hence at that point in time I
did not whine that I did not get enough challenges (I complained about
the salary and the work conditions though 
).
Cribbing about not enough learning opportunities is a really bad idea then. The whole thing comes back to me taking charge of learning new things and applying them to the problems that I come across.
Important problems
And I started asking, ``What are the important problems of your field?'' And after a week or so, ``What important problems are you working on?'' And after some more time I came in one day and said, ``If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?'' I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring. —- Richard Hamming
So, what are the important problems in the world of computers now ? On a first sweep, I think these areas merit attention
- search
- spam-less and unobtrusive communication
- connecting with your friends
- caching for web content
- painless mysql benchmarking tool (which would benchmark your server as well as your schema)
Which of these do I work on ? Or are there other problems that I am missing ?