I like to dabble in the "user experience" a lot, but when I say "dabble," I mean "No one in the world would EVER let me influence user experience so I pretty to do it on my own projects in order to feel like I'm contributing something. I have Smashing Magazine in my feed reader, among others. I just don't have the eye for the "design" part of the whole equation. I'm not a command line zealot either, but I don't know how to recreate the "feel" of an app that I really like. So I continue to dabble.

This morning, I was reading through the feed reader, and just went on a link stroll through the internet after clicking through links to other articles. I stumbled on a blog that I wish were still around, called Creating Passionate Users. I found it because Jeff of Coding Horror was blogging about why Passionate Users is no longer around. While I didn't much care for the Jeff's recent post (not that it isn't important, just that it's not something that is directly on my mind), it led me to a few links that I found were directly inspiring to not only user experience, but to general life: Jeff's Who Needs Talent When You Have Intensity and Kathy's How To Be An Expert

I've posted what I think it takes to be a good developer before. I've worked with some good developers, and I've worked with some bad developers, and I've worked with developers in between. The colleagues that I really have to dig to remember are mostly the ones that write code as a 9-5 job. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I can tell you that you don't do a job that you LOVE the same way you do a job that you start at 9am and end a 5pm. I've worked with people who claim coding is their passion, but don't seem to take pride in their work (and in all but one case, I have to clean up that work, the one case being I was laid off in time to miss that maintenance...) But after all is said and done, just like Tenacious D is musically horrible yet entertaining, the good developers are those with passion.

How do I have passion? On my bedside table, there currently sits a copy of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer Omnibus Vol 2" along with "JSP, JSF, and Tomcat", "Pro Javascript Techniques", and "Java Generics." Buffy usually gets read once a week or so. I write code at work at all, and then I come home and write more code. I usually like to take on a new language or a new framework every three months or so. I find niches that need to be filled. And what makes an expert, as Kathy points out in her post, is someone who is always looking for ways to improve. I recently endeavored on the quest to re-engineer the backend of Entertainer, because it had some valid issues, and because I knew I could make it better.

The moral of the story is that I need to stop "dabbling" in understand user experiences, and make it my passion, so that it will start showing through in the products I create or help to create. You should do the same for the things you want to do.