Creating Work From Your Passion ... or Finding Passion in Your Work

Recently I wrote an entry about finding what you're passionate about to help determine what projects you might want to work on during your time off. In the past few days, I've read a few blog entries that not so gently reminded me that if you want to take your passion and make it your bill paying work instead of your hobby, it will only work if your passion includes or can withstand the nasty, smelly, ugly side of running a business to make money. (Note that this is totally doable, but it's best to go into the business eyes wide open to some of these items)

These posts reminded me that leaving your passions as hobbies so that you enjoy them as such is a perfectly valid choice. If this is the route you take, make sure to find *something* that is part of your current work that you can take joy in. This will help bring several ways:

1. You'll be happier/more joyful during your work hours. This will help you be a more productive employee since you'll have something you enjoy while you're there.
2. Your passion can stay your passion. You'll have more enjoyment of it while you're doing it since you're not depending on it to pay your rent.
3. Finding something to take joy in can be hard. Look anyway.

Here is Matt Linderman from 37Signals describing this idea:

"Find meaning in what you’re doing. Work to improve your industry. Get joy from making a customer’s day. Surround yourself with the kinds of people and environment that keep you engaged. Figure out the details and day-to-day process that keep you stimulated. Focus on how you execute and making continual improvements. Get off on how you sell, not what you sell."

In my list of priorities that I laid out in my previous post on this topic, I listed a lot of things that are not work related. Some of these include my wonderful wife, our awesome kids, my faith, and singing in a barbershop chorus. These are the really important things to me outside of work. Sure, I'd love to work on a famous project and/or for a big company, but is it important enough for me to take the time away from these other priorities to do so?

Should I realign my priorities? I'm not particularly inclined to at the moment because I love my wife and our kids, spending time with them, and taking care of them. Apart from that, singing brings great joy and has been a wonderful way to spend my personal time away from my family.

This does not mean that I'll abandon pb_ray or my vimrc repository. I will continue working on them as I get the opportunity. I'll also continue practicing my craft so that I get better. I just haven't yet found that project that is special enough to be a passion for me.

In the mean time, I plan to do my best at going through the 6 steps at the end of Amy Hoy's post on the subject. In other words, to steal her punch line, to practice open eyed passion instead of blindly following my passion.

Any suggestions, of course, are welcome. As is debate with anything said above.

pb_ray: A Ray Tracer Based On pbrt

One of my projects on github is pb_ray. It's my implementation of pbrt from version 1 of Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation. I'm using version 1 since I can read that version of the book on Safari Books Online and version 2 isn't there at this point. I'd happily read version 2 but, compared to the price of the Safari Books Online subscription (free for me from my company), it's very expensive.

Edit: I checked Safari Books Online this morning and it looks like the 2nd Edition of Physically Based Rendering has shown up. Given that, I've just added it to my favorites list there and will start taking a look through it. Thanks guys!

I'm pretty sure that my version of the code is still in line with what Matt Phar and Greg Humphreys have since I checked in on their code base in github to get some clues for some specific questions, but it's great to see the second version of the book available.

As I've mentioned in a previous post, passion is necessary to a project to get it done in a reasonable amount of time. Which is exactly why this project is taking so long. It's become a playground for technologies that I want to learn at my leisure.

Here are some of the things I've focused on:

1. Building in multiple environments.
1. Why? Because I'm lazy and want to be able to use Macbook Pro on the couch when I don't want to be tied to my Windows desktop. The fact that anybody can pick it up and configure as needed with a single command is also a benefit.
2. Because learning to use CMake may come in handy on a future project.
2. Unit Testing
1. While I can't follow TDD with this project to flesh out what the code is supposed to do since the book has broken down the tasks into code already, I hope for a couple things. First that, if there is anything in the code that could be written in a clearer, cleaner, more testable way I'll find it. And second that it might be useful to the actual PBRT project.
3. Vi Plugins
1. This project gave me an excuse to play with Syntastic.
2. I will likely start taking a look at adding YouCompleteMe to my vimrc repository next.

Why did I pick ray tracing? Simply because it's interesting. It was one of my favorite projects in college.

Additionally, the idea of being able to take a piece of hardware and figure out how to harness its power then tax it to the limit in service of something productive has always interested me. Ray tracing is not only computationally expensive but generates a visually pleasing result (if your input is good, of course).

The idea of pushing hardware to its limits also encompasses finding out how far I can push those limits. It's a challenge to myself to find the biggest time consumer in the run of a program then to see if I can make that part run faster. (Ok, so I know that there are a TON of people who are way smarter than I am who are also doing this and getting paid for it, but it's an interesting challenge for me)

Lastly, I'd like to learn how to make the ray tracer runable on a GPU. This has been done before, of course, but I'd like to learn how it's done. Just from a quick Google search on the subject, here is NVIDIAs page showing their work on this subject and several different renderers using their work. Doing this falls under the idea of marshaling all of the available resources to name a project run more quickly. If there's a GPU sitting on the computer idle while the CPU is crunching away at something, it might as well be used to help.