I love my job and most of the time I really enjoy writing software for a living. Its a job that's unique, misunderstood and challenging. I just read a really nice post from Joel Spolsky about what it is to write software. He calls it a game of inches:
And as you fix more and more of these little details, as you polish and shape and shine and craft the little corners of your product, something magical happens. The inches add up to feet, the feet add up to yards, and the yards add up to miles. And you ship a truly great product.
The kind of product that feels great, that works intuitively, that blows people away. The kind of product where that one-in-a-million user doing that one-in-a-million unusual thing finds that not only does it work, but it's beautiful: even the janitor's closets of your software have marble floors and solid core oak doors and polished mahogany wainscoting.
And that's when you know it's great software.
I think this job is part writer, part craftsman, its part construction worker, and part artist. It stimulates my mind in ways nothing else does. I can't believe I've been doing it for ten years and its still pretty fun.
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