Meeting at the Right Time

Have you ever had a time when everything just came together. A time when two or more separate things seemed to sync up together and you discovered there were very much the same?

It's happened two me a few times. One of the more memorable times is when I heard a young lady talking about the troubles she was having with her BMW while waiting for a church service to start. I turned around and suggested she might want to try the very good BMW shop I knew of. When I told her the name, she laughed and said she had known them for years. As we talked, we realized we both knew the same set of friends, but because we knew them from different areas of their lives (race tracks vs. rallies) we had never met before. The common people we knew were involved in both.

As it happened, I dragged her into the rally community (she became a great navigator), and she dragged me into coaching drivers at the track.

It Happened Again

I recently started a new permanent job with a major corporation. In an interesting twist on how one usually gets a job, the hiring manager sought me out. Once again, it came down to meeting some people at at the Qt World Summit 2018 and made some connections. In 2019, I sent them a copy of Hands-on Embedded Programming with Qt as a thank you for some of the help they provided. When I was suddenly looking for a new job and wanting to do Qt, I let them know I was looking and sent a resume.

In the mean time, a new Qt customer was looking for someone with experience. Through an interesting series of connections, my resume made it to the hiring manager for the new customer, and now I am working for him.

And Yet Again...

So now I am working for this new company and writing my next book, one on Qt and Design Patterns.  As I am trying to understand what the code is, it finally hits me: "That's the Model View ViewModel Design Pattern I have to write about in a couple of chapters."

As I was making some final edits to a chapter, I realized a section of code that didn't feel right to me, was basically using what I was explaining in the chapter I was editing, but missing some of the finer points.

And So?

So why am I bothering to tell you this?  There are a few reasons:

1. As a reminder that we need not to over compartmentalize what we work on. It is quite easy to learn something in one area of our lives and never see the application in another.
2. Realize that importance of things we often overlook, like Design Patterns, when we are trying to solve problems.
3. Encourage you to get out of the box. Don't just look at your code all day or keep to yourself. You never know what you might learn or gain by looking at something different or talking to someone else. I often find just explaining the issue I am trying to solve to a family member can help me thing through it. It is in the process of explaining that I understand the problem better.
4. Because these are some pretty awesome coincidences!

Cheers,

-John