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Why I Love Coding (2012)

henrikwarne.com

101–110 of 125 posts

Re: Why I Love Coding (2012)

#101

I feel like I’ve lost most of my interest in it. It’s been years since I’ve been truly excited by it and and motivated to do it, but I had been on and off the edge, losing interest for long periods of time before a random spark of motivation would bring it back, only to go out within a few months at most, and after the most recent spark, I’m not sure if I can see myself coming back to programming. It’s a strange feel…

How common is this ? At the human level, arent most adults less and less excited about their craft ? Unless they can focus on a set of deep and long term beautiful aspects (a sense of precision in thinking, in execution, a bond with the customer or person you're doing it for, a sacred like service say like medical workers) ?

I have a feeling that naturally the purpose of adult work is less self centered and ambitious but broader and fair for more people.

I'm just asking.

Re: Why I Love Coding (2012)

#102
post #84
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting past the "fear of getting it wrong" is a powerful skill. Learning that it's actually easier to fix a mistake than to get something right first time is the first step to developing that skill.

This is so true! When starting work on a new project or feature I nowadays actively try to embrace ugly solutions. Refactoring after you have a working solution is much easier than coming up with a perfect solution (which probably doesn't exist).

And when you get your ugly solution going, you can show it to somebody else and help them understand the domain and get feedback.

It's a lot easier for somebody to understand and then critique when you've got something concrete to demonstrate

Re: Why I Love Coding (2012)

#103
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're lucky enough to actually write code (or preferably, solve problems) at work then you're already quite lucky. I seem to spend all my time in meetings, preparing presentations, performing sysadmin tasks, testing things owned by other teams or external providers, looking things up for people, "resolving" tickets, communicating with other teams, chasing other teams, debugging internal infrastructure, doing code…

Coding is hell in the wrong environment. Requirements always changing, not being allowed to go back and fix or improve things...

> Requirements always changing, not being allowed to go back and fix or improve things...

This resonates with me. Working in a startup environment is fun and scrapy, but when you're never able to go back and improve what you did because "we barely care about that feature anymore" it becomes pretty frustrating. Building features that only a handful of people use is also soul draining.

Re: Why I Love Coding (2012)

#104

I feel like I’ve lost most of my interest in it. It’s been years since I’ve been truly excited by it and and motivated to do it, but I had been on and off the edge, losing interest for long periods of time before a random spark of motivation would bring it back, only to go out within a few months at most, and after the most recent spark, I’m not sure if I can see myself coming back to programming. It’s a strange feel…

Are you burnt out? Every person needs a break. Well in the end, programming is a means to an end. Sometimes people obsess and see the skill as the ends. Some others see it as a tool to achieve their goals. Anyways maybe take a break/vacation or something.

Re: Why I Love Coding (2012)

#105
That's why I don't know what to say to people who ask me why I would write my own date picker control or my own URL parser or (you might want to sit down for this) my own cryptography routines. If you don't already understand why I would want to do that, I don't have an explanation that's going to make sense.

Re: Why I Love Coding (2012)

#106
post #27

Coding at work sucks. Coding at home is great as a hobby.

> Coding at work sucks. Coding at home is great as a hobby.

Curious why you think that is. I think the difference is that coding under unreasonable deadlines (and then getting blamed when the quality produced under the unreasonable deadline is low) is what sucks.

Re: Why I Love Coding (2012)

#107
I literally view coding as a skill, like a blacksmith of the past or a mid-higher level field architect. My one coworker/semi-mentor also seems to view it that way.

I'm not even that good, I just learned enough Java etc to be solid as a mid-level engineer at age 29.

It pays well, sometimes it's fun (with coffee and techno music of course). But I do what I need to do to get the job done well, and then reap the benefits of having a skill that's in demand to build what companies/society wants.

Re: Why I Love Coding (2012)

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another one has been learning how software fits the bigger picture. In order for a company to succeed with software, things starting from vision, strategy, execution need to be in line This was something that I experienced in my career trajectory. My first shift from pure programming was to requirements definition, which I enjoyed. I then got involved in specifying the need for systems in the first place - developi…

> Luckily I was (mostly) able to stay tech-focussed rather than moving into pure management Can you expand on this? Like what was the title, or was this a unique role to your business? This thread has really resonated with me and where I might want to be taking my career.

Sure!

The title was unique to my business but in practice I was a ‘Senior’ position. I joined a company that had been part of the UK civil service but which had been privatised before I joined. The part I belonged to conducted advice-side / customer-friend work as opposed to supply-side / product-development. So in effect I was an independent technical consultant deployed into UK Govt customer organisations (in Defence) to support their activities, which included the stuff I mentioned before (requirements definition, business case development, etc). I did this for approx. 10 years, starting very technically focussed (e.g. helping to draft tech sections of Invitations To Tender or contributing to standards development) but gradually looking at business / organisational issues (e.g. can we restructure this organisation to reduce commercial and technical barriers to efficiency? / what research do we need to do to conduct to de-risk this new simulation technology?). I became reasonably well known in the customer community and, crucially, was trusted as a friendly techie rather than a commercial ‘suit’.

The plus side to this was getting superb levels of customer access and some experiences not available to most civilians. Because I had been around for years the customers saw me as someone who actually understood their domain and their problems. I knew their acronyms and understood their business processes, more so than some of them did (especially customers who were new in role).

The downside was that from the perspective of my parent company, I had effectively ‘gone native’ with the customers (although was still useful because I generated revenue and demonstrated the competence of my company). I had to be commercially fire-walled away from the product side of the company so that the customers still trusted me. This limited my career development – partly because I couldn’t be involved in high-profile bids and delivery projects that attracted C-suite attention. As an example, although my salary increased okay, I found it very hard to gain evidence (e.g. third party feedback) that would support a grade rise. As it was, I didn’t mind too much (this was the latter end of my career) but had I been younger it would have been frustrating.

Re: Why I Love Coding (2012)

#109
I loved coding for a short period of time before work stress made me hate it. I went from Developer for 4 years to Sales Engineer for the past 3. I'm now completely exhausted of joy for Sales Engineering and now want to get back into something purely technical, but not sure if my Development PTSD from my past company is done.

What can scratch a similar intellectual itch as coding that doesn't come with the same stress? Data Analysis? Technical Writing?

Re: Why I Love Coding (2012)

#110

I dislike the use of the word "coding" here. I don't enjoy coding that much. Typing text into the computer is menial work. What is being described here is more generally called programming. If I spend my entire day typing code then it's a bad day. There are no castles in the sky, only text on the screen. The castles are made in my head. Coding is just a necessary evil to get my ideas from my head into the computer. B…

If you want to be pedantic, "coding" was about translating by hand instructions into machine code when working with the very early computers where there were no assembler yet.
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