Heh, while I assume that this was mostly rhetorical and largely tongue-in-cheek it is a question that I've been pondering lately. (Or, more accurately, thinking about what work excites me.)
I've been working on jQuery full-time now for about 1.5 years (sponsored by my employer, Mozilla). Prior to that I worked on jQuery in my spare time for about 4 years while doing other things (I was in college, then in Y Combinator - Summer 2006, and then worked for Mozilla as a JavaScript Evangelist).
I've managed to pigeon-hole myself into the position of a JavaScript framework maintainer rather solidly (for better or worse).
That being said I really enjoy what I do and have trouble thinking of something that I would rather do as my day job. Being able to work on a piece of code that I've largely written from scratch and promote it to a community of eager users is my dream. I've often thought about making a leap into something else but struggle to think of something that would hold my interest as deeply.
I'm largely not interested in starting or joining a business. For whatever reason I frequently find that attaching a profit motive to work largely impedes my ability to be happy and seems to run contrary to my overall goals (educating people, giving good tools to developers -- and providing both to anyone and everyone, no restriction).
Perhaps I'll find some interesting project some day that will open the financial floodgates (or perhaps I'll enter a situation -- such as having children -- that will necessitate me earning more than I do now) but I'm quite content now where I am, doing what I'm doing.
All this being said, I'm constantly looking at and exploring new things. At the moment though most of that is outside the realm of JavaScript, or even computers, and mostly relating to art. It's unclear to me if that's something that'll hold my long-term interest (although it has for the past few years) but we shall see.
In my life, discovering jQuery is what made front-end development fun again. I think we're incredibly fortunate to have people like you helping us build software, and if it was possible to measure the aggregate impact of your work it would be staggering..
That's correct! We started work on it in early 2006 and moved to Boston/Cambridge in June 2006 to participate in the Y Combinator program (which was a lot of fun, as many have said). We had a monumentally hard time trying to get people to fund our idea. I remember having a meeting with a potential angel investor (in Boston) that said, after our full deck was done, "Well, that sounds cool, but I'll have to ask my kids to see what they think." That was pretty typical of the Boston investing scene, with regards to mobile in 2006.
It was around that time that Twitter came out (which we poo-pooed due to its lack of features). It wasn't until a few months later (and after we had run out of money and had to get real jobs) that we realized that Twitter was a much better solution for what we had wanted to achieve.
It's not a loss, though. We had a great experience and all ended up getting great jobs doing things that we love. I went on to work at Mozilla. Julia went on to work at a few startups and is now starting a pretty cool video dating site: Inlu.st, and Josh is working at Blue State Digital (he did work for the Obama campaign).
Pretty much, yeah! When that episode of The Office aired we all emailed each other - it was pretty hilarious. Of course ours was a bit more pragmatic, it would only send to the medium that would best get in contact with you - and you could use it to bulk send messages to your friends. A tool like that doesn't really need to exist in this day-and-age as everyone always has their cell phone and modern cell phones are super-capable.
That's awesome. Facebook seems to be trying to do what you did with their new messaging features. I'm sure it's totally different in some fundamental way but interesting that they went there.
Unfortunately I've never had any formal training in art (either through technique or through study) - and it wasn't until after college that I realized that this was a passion of mine - so it's been pretty slow going. I've been taking a number of classes and practicing on my own, starting to become more familiar with oil painting and generally trying to improve my technique and composition.
However where my real passion lies is in art history. Specifically I've been spending a considerable amount of time studying, researching, and collecting Ukiyo-e (Edo-era Japanese woodblock prints). It's an incredible art form and to study it is to study the complete culture of Japan in the 17th to 19th century. I'm lucky as I live less than a mile away from the Harvard art library and have a friend that works as a librarian there - so I end up spending a lot of time checking out research material, studying, and learning. (For example, right now I'm reading a book on Kabuki theater and its relevance within the context of Ukiyo-e.)
I've started to write a little bit about the art form (as my time allows, which is kind of challenging) here:
http://ukiyoe.tumblr.com/
