41–50 of 72 posts
I love going from a blank slate to a working piece of software. I love that I can create things with just a terminal and a text editor.
The fact that I get paid to do it for a living is amazing, and something I find a little surreal from time-to-time.
Secondly, because it is very rewarding. To create something non-trivial and watch it work for the first time, after a dozens of failures, gives me a lot of satisfaction.
Wow, the question actually made me more aware of my motivation. It seems that everything I did was some case of "it looks simple, I can do it! Others will admire me. :)".
I, as a kid, played a lot of games on Amiga 500. Naturally, I was amazed by them and didn't even dream of doing a game myself. Later in life, a friend showed me how to do a 3d model in 3d Studio.
I liked it a lot, I could spend nights polishing minor details on car models (like those: http://hrekin.za.pl/) As I was spending a lot of time in front of a computer, parents decided it would be nice thing for me to study Computer Science.
I remember, that my expectation then was something along the lines "They will teach me there how to make an application like 3d Studio Max", or actually any other desktop application. I was truly believing it would be the case. I was trying really hard to learn as much to make it happen.
But still, even 3 years after graduation, I didn't know how to write a desktop application which does some very rudimentary things. I was expecting it would be very easy to it, since everybody else seemed to do it: you click on a file with a certain extension and appropriate app opens.
Today, I am actually writing a very simple desktop application with all the pieces in place.
Of course, in the course, I had successes in more job related fields. I did survive a financial app maintenance and even got to sell one Android application to a commercial bank - which wasn't trivial, since it had some advanced computer vision stuff implemented (in pure C, no libraries used). I also wrote a C# game.
When I was younger, the first real thing that grabbed me was magic (after reading, of course!). To me, programming is like magic. It's that aha moment that you can induce in people (and yourself), that leaves them baffled and amazed (the sanskrit word for this is ascarya , wonderment). Unfortunately, computer programs share two unfortunate aspects of magic: (1) The trick, once repeated, rarely evokes the same reactio…
Apart from the motivation to prove to myself that I can do it, it's fun. Nothing quite like getting some piece of code to run successfully, or making something that people enjoy using.
Unfortunately, the hobby was never discouraged by my parents (constantly told to get off the computer because I was "melting my brain", being heavily pushed towards business and law related subjects etc.). Although I can't entirely blame them, the result was I lost interest around high school. I didn't rediscover my passion until about my Junior year of college (thanks to Skyrim modding, honestly).
I'm here now, and I love it. I'm currently learning C and I look forward to playing catchup with everyone who had a real head start.
* I can be god-like. When working on a side project, I get to make ALL the decisions.
* It's rewarding. Being able to take an idea born purely from my thoughts, and make it into something real, is inherently rewarding. Although I guess this applies to any creative endeavor, with coding it's cheap (all I need is a computer) and the feedback loop is short.
It also works the other way around. Code helps me think. It's rigid and exact, and doesn't allow for vagueness in ideas. It means that, when I'm coding, I'm required to think things through. It forces me to bring blurry notions into sharp focus.
And lastly, I believe it makes me a better person. Programming is a refined balancing act between abstracting and precision, between simplicity and complexity. Doing that balancing act makes me more capable of handling other situations. It trains your mind to understand complexity and reduce it, just as it trains it to see the problems with simplicity that make it more complex.
Oh, and it's also a great way to pay the bills. But I would still be coding if it didn't, I'd probably still be coding if I had to actually pay money to do so.