I compare programming to anchovies. You either like it or you don’t. Granted, there are people that write code for a living and probably don’t actually enjoy it. I fall into the lucky group of people that LOVE programming. I can sit for hours putting together code that, in all honesty, doesn’t really achieve anything. Most if not all of my programs are utilitarian at best. More like little automation tools for tasks that would be tedious if done by hand. Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing but I believe it separates me from “real” programmers. I’m a hobbyist coder. Structure and coding the correct way are pushed aside by my eagerness to achieve an end result. Again, this is not a bad thing as long as I confine my “apps” to my own usage. Very few get battle tested enough for me to be able to offer them for the usage of others. I still remain as completely fascinated with the process as I was the first time I ever typed a command into my TRS-80. Programming models life. And life can be modeled in programming code. I can’t imagine ever getting to a point where programming doesn’t interest me.
July 11th, 2010 on 11:58 pm
How many programs do you have now?
July 15th, 2010 on 2:37 pm
I only have a few that I use often. A couple are utilities I wrote for work that help build job templates and generate reports for address lists that we use. One is used by News25 to upload their school/business closings during the winter season. The Xbox image in the upper right corner of this page was generated using an app that I wrote. It grabs my latest avatar image as well as the icons for the last 16 games I’ve played and combines them into one composite image, then uploads it to my blog. And the last one that I use the most is a utility to upload my currently playing song information whenever the track changes in iTunes. Once it gathers the track info, it generates and uploads a text file that’s used by the OnAirNow script that’s on the front page of the blog. None of these are anything ground breaking but they are useful to me and fun as hell to write. I’ll post some source to one or more of them sometime soon.