[einhverfr]

I used to find, btw, the pressure of programming difficult to deal with on an ongoing basis. Then one day it occurred to me:

Perfection in the big projects doesn't matter. The world is full of crap software. Perfection in the little pieces however really matters, and this makes it possible to build better software.

I still have stressful days, usually involving bug reports and unhappy users. However, for the most part that realization meant that rather than the stress being an ongoing thing, sometimes lasting days or weeks, it became an occasional thing usually lasting only hours, and the sense of beauty in seeing successful things come together has become more common. That doesn't mean you spend time chasing perfection on every little detail because a lot of things are legitimate tradeoffs and you won't know some deficiencies until it is actually used.

To me that is craftsmanship.