What the heck do you do anyway?

People ask me what I do a lot. Most of the time I don’t really have a good answer. When I was developing full time it was easy. I would just say, “I’m a software engineer/developer/programmer/whatever” and wait for the disinterested look to set in so we could move onto a different subject. Now that I have a half silly/half interesting title so the glazed over eyeballs have disappeared.

“Oooh. A technology evangelist. What is that?” they say while instinctively reaching to cover their purse or wallet.

For a while I tried the, “Well, I mostly sit around and think big thoughts” answer. Unfortunately people didn’t find that particularly satisfying, kind of like they were expecting something good like a steak and instead got a White Castle slider.

Aaaand that will be the part of this post that everyone remembers, Lammi bagging on White Castle. It was like a conversation that I had with a friend years ago about sliders:

Me: “You know, there’s little guarantee that that thing is made from beef. There’s a real good chance it is made from a rat.”

Friend: “But it’s a good tasting rat.”

*Sigh*

Anyhow, enough about food and more about me. Part of what I do is work on super secret projects that I can’t mention because they’re secret. Another part of what I do is help plan corporate strategy by looking into new ideas and examining what else is being done in the market. Imagine a mix of General Patton and Joan Rivers but only applied to software.

“We’re going to move this functionality to the front and start a new push for the Transmogifier market here. Oh and did you see where so and so put that dialog box in their last release? That’s like wearing a compiler after Labor Day with no accessories, what were they thinking?”

I also write. And then I write some more. And then after that I write some more. The good news is that we have an in-house editor, we’ll call her Sarah. (Because, well, that’s her name.) She has the unfortunate job of making sure that all the letters I write to paper form words and sentences with things like coherent thoughts connecting them. I just got back an article I wrote that she went over and it looked like a red pen exploded all over it. Then after it exploded it called a few of its red pen friends over and they exploded on it too. Thank god she doesn’t proof this blog, it would probably be too much for her to bear. I mean look, I’ll just type a sentence that is pure punctuation.

.!;,’::.!,..;.

That would drive her nuts.

But anyhow that’s what I do. I do secret stuff, I plan and strategize, I write, and I drive my editor to the brink of insanity. I still won’t eat White Castle’s though.

(Seriously, it could really be a rat. Yuck.)