So, I finally made it down to Gankplank. I’ve been meaning to get down here for a while, but I’ve just not made it happen. I took the weekend to get my development environment up to snuff on my laptop (so I can actually work anywhere now!) and decided to give it a shot.

This place is cool. Very cool. The atmosphere is invigorating - it’s exactly the sort of place I’d love to really put in some serious time at. Smart people, lots of technology, and a laid-back, fun, productive atmosphere. Awesome.

It also highlights fairly starkly the fact that I don’t have much in the way of “hack” projects to work on. Most all my stuff these days is Real Work(TM), which, good as it is, isn’t the sort of thing that you can really unwind with. I need a project that I can work on and let it fail - something I can sink some serious creative juices into. I want to break out of what I’ve been working on for 90 hours per week for the last couple of years, and sink my teeth into something truly creative.

I’ve got a lot of directions I could go - I have a few webapps in mind, some node.js ideas, a few experiments with MongoDB. I want to do more Android development and get better with Java; I want to learn Clojure and maybe even poke at Haskell. I want to find an excuse to use Amazon’s compute clusters to solve some ridiculously huge-scale problem. More than that, I want to find out what I don’t know about yet, and put some effort towards learning it.

I don’t have a good answer for what I want to do tonight, but it’s a good starting point. I’m excited at the opportunity and sheer energy this place provides - a place to work, to be creative, to talk and play and laugh and hack and enjoy. I’ll find something interesting to do yet.