Today I had a good conversation with my friend Rafiek about how I feel about web design. This conversation helped me understand some important things that are happening in my professional life right now.

I recently found that I don’t have as much interest in building websites for others as I used to have. I can get irritated by the thought of having to finish work. I’ve been wondering for a while what the hell is wrong with me. I need to work to make money, but if I don’t like the work I’m doing, I can’t work with pleasure, which will mean that my work will be of lesser quality. Then I spoke to Rafiek.

Looking back to my professional history, I’ve been the best at jobs where I was troubleshooting or solving problems. Research, analyses, testing for review… Those were things I loved to do.

I am very good with PHP and MySQL. I can write any small script by heart. If I put my back into it, I could probably come up with the next best CMS. But instead I love trying out existing CMSes and tweak them, change code around, try out new stuff.

Tonight “Men Youppo” a Haitian guy I met while assisting with the sNews project, asked me for some help. He had trouble creating some picture upload system. Something was not going right but he could not find the problem. It took me less then 15 minutes to study the script and find the problem. Then another problem arose. 5 minutes later that problem was solved.

This is what I am good at. Troubleshooting, problem solving and research. That’s what I should be doing. My next task is to research what possibilities there are to earn some good money with what I seem to love, especially in my country, where the Information era is just starting.