There really is a special kind of satisfaction when you see something you wrote actually work. I remember the first time I made a sprite move around the screen with arrow keys, I probably moved that guy around for several minutes just out of pride. I'm sure we all have similar memories.
> There really is a special kind of satisfaction when you see something you wrote actually work.
I think your second sentence is actually the key here - first time. If you do something day in day out for 20 years there’s no surprise if it works.
Thankfully, there’s plenty of room in the domain of programming for someone to go from seasoned expert to absolute beginner and experience the joy all over again.
> If you do something day in day out for 20 years there’s no surprise if it works.
The Japanese inter-related concepts of Kaizen, Muri, Muda, Mura, Hansei, and Ikigai are relevant here, I believe. Except for the most mundane, immediately-automatable "something", I have always found an area for improvement and thus, delight. Though Feynman commented there is plenty of room at the bottom about the physical world, considering his life history I believe he would also concur about the cognitive world.
Kaizen, Ikigai, and Hansei might be classified as ideologies, but Muri, Muda, and Mura are just normal words that seem to have been wrangled into ideology status by some Western institutes...it's like if I took the word 'unnecessary' or 'consistency' and called it an ideology. Just...why?
I'm sure if I asked my caucasian wife she'd say something about exoticism.
I liken the more pedestrian words to the words I use to get myself to the gym. Instead of muttering "perseverance", I mumble "find a way". I pick the pedestrian words when they resonate with me in some contexts, and the five dollar words when they resonate more.
I believe there is beauty, wonder, and endless improvement within attention to detail to be found in honing the same craft repeatedly over the years. There Is Plenty Of Room at the Bottom. Jiro Dreams of Sushi is one of my favorite movies that touches upon this.
Exactly - the first time you work out a "puzzle" it's amazing - especially if it's a complex one without a "solution" that you can glance at when you get stuck.
But doing roughly the same thing for 20 years it can get wearing - it's a different form of brainwork at that point.
Why would you code roughly the same thing over and over? Don't people do that because they want a nice and easy job rather than constantly challenging themselves?
My impression is that if you constantly do "exciting" stuff you burn out at work. It isn't like school where you do new things all the time but they give you plenty of time to internalize stuff. So people eventually just accept the easy situation where they are comfortable and don't have to do new exciting things.
When I was a kid and learned about BASIC, I would write little snippets of code in my paper notebook. I didn’t have a computer at home at the time.
One time we were doing a math test in the computer room with Apple IIes and we were allowed to use them as our calculator. I finished the test early, so I thought, what program can I write in the five to ten minutes I have that would be neat? I ended up just making the screen fill with random characters. I was so proud to get it to work.
In high school I even wrote assembly code in the library on some loose leaf paper as I once was gripped with a really neat idea I had to express.
Honestly, my teenage years were filled with moments like these when I first learned to code.
A magic moment for me was writing a sorting algorithm that was horrifically inefficient (I think it was like bubble sort but worse), and then later finding out about recursive sorting and making what I now know to be merge sort. It was really special to realize that you can make code that does the same thing but faster if you're clever.
Conversely I get the opposite. I come up with an elegant solution to a problem, but the previous dev has architect things in such a way won't work. Rinse repeat a few times until you have something that will work, but is not elegant at all.
I feel like the people going before me are the "ninja coders" I see in job ads. With all my years of experience I come up with various ways to solve a problem, but these guys are so much more effective than me in anticipating my moves and have a way to block them already.
I come up with an elegant solution to a problem, but the previous dev has architect things in such a way won't work.
Finding an elegant solution to a problem in isolation is usually quite easy because you can ignore all the edges that make it hard. Finding an elegant solution to something within the constraints of where the problem actually lies is what separates great developers from the rest of us.
Elegant solutions and considering all edge cases are not mutually exclusive. I see where you are coming from, but not all of the pieces of crap code are there to cover edge cases, just that the previous developer was a bit crap.
> I remember the first time I made a sprite move around the screen with arrow keys, I probably moved that guy around for several minutes just out of pride. I'm sure we all have similar memories.
