by Daniel Ackerman on
The day after I stopped working for BusyConf last summer, I was on the road to college. Since then, something has been missing. Even if I didn’t make any entrepreneurial decisions at BusyConf, I missed the ambitious, competitive, high-tech atmosphere. At school, I had to create my own passion for success, and keep up my programming skills with daily practice. In contrast, that was a given by just arriving at work before. At BusyConf, I was given the opportunity to challenge myself and improve myself with useful technology skills, but at school, I was graded on my ability to regurgitate words from my textbooks.
Although I allowed for some of the programming skills I learned at BusyConf to slide, many of them made my life at school easier. The skills I gained with the Mac, and software suggestions from Ryan (such as Evernote), allowed me to power through my classes easily. Advantageously, I have archived notes from all of my classes. My programming classes were somewhat boring at times, but towards the end of my second semester, I saw a chance to effectively use GitHub on a final project. My roommate (Richard) and I built a visual binary search tree program in Java. Ryan indirectly taught me about formatting a GitHub page, and working in a team last summer. If Ryan had not shown me how to use GitHub last summer, I would not have been able to build a project nearly as complex. The project was such a success that our professor, Dr. Siochi, asked if he could use it next year to teach students about binary search trees.
College hasn’t been all that bad, but I think it was the absence of BusyConf from my week that made it seem mundane. This summer I am looking forward to working on more inherently interesting projects for BusyConf. I think I will accomplish more in the next 3 months than the last 9. My goal for this summer is to understand web development enough that I can start building websites. My new found confidence with the command line, general knowledge of Ruby, a little bit more web know-how, and of course working at BusyConf, will all help me to achieve my goal.
