I'm pleased to announce that we're kicking off 2011 with some new blood on the team, starting with Nick Craver.
Nick will be working remotely for us from North Carolina.
Nick is an old friend of Jarrod Dixon, so he comes highly recommended. Jarrod always told me how great Nick was, and although I implicitly trust Jarrod's opinion, I sort of waved him off with a yeah, yeah. But then this happened:
When you top the Stack Overflow reputation leagues for 2010, rest assured you now have my full and unfettered attention.
Apparently Nick's membership to Stack Overflow predates even Jon Skeet's, but he didn't get serious about participation until he dropped his World of Warcraft habit. Sounds like a good idea to me -- why not spend your time on a MMORPG that teaches skills that make you better at your profession?
Every day, my guild leader faced a decision: play WoW, or work toward becoming a paramedic. If she played WoW, she'd have fun, and advance a character or improve the guild in some small but measurable way. If she worked toward becoming a paramedic, her progress would be much less visible. It's easy to say that on any given day, the decision doesn't really matter. But every day spent on WoW drove her in circles, and every day spent studying paramedicine would have brought her one day closer to her goal. And days add up, like it or not. We cannot stop them from doing so. What we can do is decide what they add up to.
I didn't want to look around one day and discover I'd turned into my guild leader, dreams on the horizon but unachieved because my days added up to nothing. The idea frightened and depressed me.
So I quit. I quit hard enough that the way the game had pulled me in the last time wasn't an option anymore. And instead of spending an hour every day doing my daily quests in-game, I spent an hour every day doing "daily quests" in real life - I started working out. I started leveling my actual skills and stats.
-- Doing My Dailies: Why I Quit WoW And Started Working Out
This strategy certainly worked for Nick. I have to say, as MMORPGs go, he has totally crushed this one.
Welcome to the team, Nick, and we all look forward to the additional awesome you'll be adding to the project!