Choosing Your Own Adventure

Great post. Good luck, Jeff!

I love those books too. Found some old ones I couldn’t have been more thrilled (though WhichWay books were even more awesome :).

gl

Good luck Jeff. I have been consulting for 16+ years and if I had to work full-time for anyone in any role, I think I’d have to jump out of my skin after two days.

All the best with your next project. Being independent is more fun that being an Evangelist of anything - because Independence has-a Freedom.

Hey Jeff -

Does this mean this you’ll be switching back to VB.NET now that you’re in charge again??

Or have you fallen head-over-heels for C#? :frowning:

Inquiring minds want to know! :-))

These books were my first. I started reading them and when my school library ran out of them, I shifted to Hardy Boys. These literary adventures started my voracious appetite in books.

I like your article. Your thing is brilliant.
Suzzane Waltz

Good luck Jeff.

Any clue on what you’ll be taking up aside from blogging?

Congrats! This is a big step, and I’m sure it’s the right one. I’ve really enjoyed working with you, and I can’t wait to follow along on your direction.

At least with Choose Your Own Adventure, you don’t have to worry about death by dysentery.

Good luck, Jeff!

Best of luck with the new venture Jeff. As you’ve shown with your blog over the past few years, you’re a talented chap and I’m sure you will make a success of it.

Looking forward to reading all about it over the coming months.

You know what you’re doing, but it’s a brave choice. I look forward to hearing about your new adventures, I hope they prove successful.

Good luck, Jeff. It is scary, and it’s hard to make such a decision. Mine was made for me when my employer laid me off and I decided to do what I wanted, not what was expected. But as you say, if it’s not a little scary, it’s probably not worth it.

I was a little worried when I read the choice you had to make. I thought back to last weeks blog how you assumed a blog was closing because of his relationship with Microsoft. I thought the blog was ending.

Then when I read your choice, I was just as worried. To think you’d only be writing and not out there in the thick of it getting your hands dirty so you’d have something to write about.

It sounds like a very difficult decision you’ve had to make, and after the very high regard you give Vertigo - it also seems like a very honourable one.

Best of luck with your new adventure - let’s hope the chances of success are a little greater than the 30% in Cave Of Time.

@BradC

The one CYOA book I remember the most is “Inside UFO 54-40” (#12 of the original series). Throughout the whole book you are searching for this utopian paradise, and there is actually a “Congratulations, You found it!” page in the book, but THERE IS NO WAY TO REACH IT! I didn’t make a graph, but I remember searching through the entire book to see if there was a “turn to Page 101”. There was not. So do we call that unreachable code? Should the book not compile?

I remember that one! I did the same thing – saw the “you found it!” page, and then flipped through the whole book looking for a reference, and found that there wasn’t one!

That “unreachable” page sounds like a private method with no references to it; nothing that wouldn’t compile, but probably a good candidate for a compile-time warning message!

To stretch this somewhat silly analogy even further, we could call the process of flipping through a choose-your-own-adventure book in that manner a primitive version of using a decompilation tool. :slight_smile:

@Jeff

Best of luck in your new pursuit, and good for you for not being afraid to step out of your comfort zone and go for it! I’m looking forward to reading more about it in the future.

@Alan Hogan

and keep your finger on the current page so you can go back if you don’t like it

I knew I couldn’t be the only one who used to do that. :slight_smile:

I’ll be right there every step of the way!

I think this may have generated more comments then most of the other posts. Except mabey one… something about 2 types of programmers. :wink:

I’ve recently read this. I know, it’s somewhat late. But better late, than never.

And I think that the post is quite an EPIC way to announce that you’re leaving behind the monthly payment and finally going on your own. And by the way: it’s inspiring, encouraging. And despite I’m not planning to leave my monthly payment, not now, or not yet, I feel quite better after reading this. Thanks! :smile:

I’m extremely late to this discussion, but the analogy is not quite sound. The Cave of Time has definitive endings while career options don’t. It happens all the time that someone leaves a company to pursue a dream, then comes back when they’ve hit a dead-end.

Choose your own adventure books are one of my cherished childhood memories. The book that broke the mold for me was ‘Inside UFO 54-40’. Not all paths can be mapped linearly and there’s even one path that starts on a random page. ‘Race Forever’ also had a recursive path that never ended.

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