I’ve been doing the computer thing for over 10 years now. I’ve been programming for most of them. I know a bunch of languages, technologies and other doodads.

To this day almost nothing can compete with the feeling I get from creating an efficient, elegant computer program. Well, some things can. We’ll eliminate my daughter, family, or being in love. So aside from those things, nothing else can compete with that aforementioned feeling. Sex… O.K. nothing besides the hitherto mentioned children, family, love or sex can compete. Anyway.

We are creating a completely new platform at the office that touches pretty much every aspect of how we do business. Very little is being left untouched. After a bit of play we settled on Perl and MySQL. Given a totally clean slate I would’ve picked PostgreSQL but I eventually succumbed to the idea that rewriting everything was enough and changing databases was a bit much.

A bit of shopping and tire-kicking yielded Catalyst and Class::DBI. After a few months of riding in the Class::DBI-mobile I sucked it up and switched us over to DBIx::Class. This frustrated Mike to no end but I think we have found a real winner. The capabilities of DBIx::Class leave Class::DBI in the dust. Many of the awesome developers that work on Catalyst also work on DBIx::Class so the two are a great combination. I can’t say enough good things about Catalyst. Mike and I have both contributed features and fixes to the two projects.

Very little matches the sense of accomplishment and pride that results from a well designed and carefully implemented solution to a problem. I only know a handful of people who can identify with this feeling. It’s a wellspring of eternal frustration that I can’t conduct this feeling to people that don’t do it for a living. I attach a lot of emotion to a project and when they start getting messy and kludgy I get frustrated and lose motivation. Our current project, Greenspan, has been developed slowly and methodically to avoid as many hacks as possible. I think that my newfound aversion to working at home has been a big contributer to my enthusiasm at work.

I’m rambling. The moral here? Programming, for me, is not so much a job as it is a passion. Most days I have to tear myself away from my work. I enjoy it so much that it has occurred to me that I should feel bad for being paid to do it. But I think that’s the reason they hired me: I love this stuff. I could give a shit about languages and frameworks. I care about solving problems efficiently and elegantly and providing a great ROI for my employer. I owe Mike for getting me into this, Kevin showing me the ropes, Cal for helping me realize why I do this, Bob for being another in a procession of awesome bosses, and Jackson, Mike, Kevin and Jon for being peers that continually drive me to do better. I’ve probably left out a number of people: You guys kick ass.

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Posted at : March 6th, 2006 - 8:23 pm
Filed under : Code, Design, General, Java, Languages, Life, Perl, Ruby, Useless Information, Work
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