I have a very hot and cold relationship with my chosen profession. While I occasionally get to whip up all new code, I am often times maintaining someone else’s code or hunting down some sort of bug. Stripped down to its skins, my job is basically one where people present me with a problem and it is my job to solve the puzzle and figure out what is causing the bug and come up with a fix of some sort. There is a big difference between coding up something that is all your own creation and being forced to fix other people’s broken stuff. It weighs you down sometimes. You begin to feel like the downtrodden janitor, shuffling off to clean up the giant mess those damned spider monkeys made in aisle 10 all the while daydreaming in secret of the day you will make your giant, brightly lit debut in the latest musical on Broadway.

However, today is not that day for me. I managed to solve a huge problem for my team where I work. I wont go into too many specifics, but the bug ended up being a bug in our app server JBoss and not in our code. Many people have tried to squash this bug, but it always came back. I don’t want to toot my own horn too much, but I am incredibly proud to have been the one who finally figured out the problem.

It is times like this that I am reminded why I became a software developer. I always tell people that it was computer games that got me into computer science. Thats true, but after a day like today I remember that its not just because I really really wanted to to program games, but its because solving real life problems by creating software is very much like a game itself. In video games you are typically presented with a problem to solve or goal to reach and you take steps to make progress to that end. Its the same with software development. Both activities push the same buttons in my brain. When I finish a game I feel great, and after finishing up a bit of code or fixing some huge bug like today, the feeling of accomplishment is the same, only in the case of software development it is a lot more “real.”

Hopefully I can keep this in mind the next time I start to get sick of what I do for a living. I just need to remember that its just a game like any other task I set out to accomplish on one of my xbox games. Except for that Call of Duty 4 “Mile High Club” achievement … that shit was created by Satan himself.

Code monkey very simple man, with big warm fuzzy secret heart…

This entry was posted on Thursday, 14 February 2008 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Aimless Rants. You can leave a response, or Trackback from your own site.