| The fun is in the parts when you get to be creative. There's plenty of boilerplate, repetitive, coding work out there. Sometimes, though, you get to wrap yourself around a juicy requirement and solve it, or add extra functionality that no-one asked for but someone will notice one day. Same with writing - doing the same old client proposal for the 50th time is no fun, but writing a fun new blog post about an awesome discovery can be great. Same with lots of work, I guess. There are two times when I really love coding - when a user expresses pleasure at using the software, and when a fellow coder expresses pleasure at fixing my stuff. If you build it right, it works on so many levels. I wish I got to code more, and I dismay constantly at the idea that coding is something to be passed out to the lowest bidder. So much time spent in meetings, an hour with 10 people discussing how a feature should work, when I know I could have just coded it up in that hour and they would have just said "Yeah, like that". Coding is engineering, but in an accelerated form. Improve the performance of an engine by 10%, something the user could notice instantly? Hard work, big dollars, lots of resources, hard to deploy to many users. Improve the performance of an application by 10%? You might do it by yourself in 30 minutes. Lots of fun. |