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[-boston-] Random thought: Sitting in my dentist's chair today, chatting about his time in dentistry school, when it occurred to me: unless you have other specific domain knowledge, or have large cojones, odds are that if you're going to study dentistry, you'll be a dentist all your life. As a software developer, this idea--one career in a lifetime--is completely foreign to me. In moments of extreme geekiness, I relate the job I do to some basic class of methods: software developers can be instantiated (for lack of a better word) into different teams across domains and can fill the needed role. You can't stick a dentist into a forestry company and expect her to perform at a high level. You put a competent developer into a forestry company, ramp them up on forestry-specific knowledge, and have them chug away on writing code that will help you increase your bottom line. And he can also do it from halfway across the world. Cool.