The Joy of Technology

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Joy of Technology

  • I surely do feel that way. It's a frequently anxiety inducing experience and often stubbornly frustrating but correspondingly rewarding. In a strange sort of way that comes regardless of the fact that you are not actually achieving anything generally considered socially uplifting. Nice article though.

  • Thanks for writing this. I think it is important for seniors in this field to share their passion in programming with many of us. Working as one of only two programmers in a small company, sometimes I find myself asking if I'm doing the right thing as I get so little feedback in terms of the actual programming process and passion. Most people in the usual company departments like finance and production are just interested in what you produce but cannot understand the why, which makes it quite frustrating.

    Thank you for sharing.

  • As usual, I agree - except for C++ as a front end language!!! (if the front end is a UI that is)

    A lot of us here are very passionate about our jobs/career/industry. We are all the better for it too.

    Gaz

    -- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!

  • This fascination you describe I think is the human desire for puzzle solving. Whether ancient astronomers working out the paths of stars and planets, or Greek mathematicians deriving proofs, or engineers throughout history developing new ways to accomplish things.

    When I was in grade school, LONG before personal computers or even calculators, one of my fascinations in English class was diagramming sentences (I don't know if they still teach that, but it consisted of graphically representing the parts of speech of a sentence to analyze its structure). Anyhow, years later I realized that my fascination with computer languages was directly descendant to this... it was just another type of statement parsing.

    ...

    -- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --

  • I enjoyed this article, Steve, thanks for writing it and pointing to the "joy of being a programmer" blog article. Programming is my first job responsibility, and being a DBA second. I do find programming to be highly rewarding, but it isn't all roses, either. My biggest issues, over the years I've worked in programming, tend to be people issues. Such as working with coworkers who don't want to consider any other option other than their own opinions. Or coworkers who manipulate situations to get what they way done, at the expense of the business or the active project. Or sometimes being so much under the gun to get something done, that you have to do it an old way, or sometimes even sloppy, because you're not allowed the time to research a new, better way. It's just "GET THIS DONE NOW OR ELSE!!!!!!" type of thing. And I really have a hard time with office politics. There's a lot to love about programming, but items such as I've mentioned are a drag to the airplane that programming can be.

    Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.

  • I also enjoy programming. I not only program at work, but I also develop personal programs at home.

    In the Fall or Winter of 2007, I read an MSDN blog article about Visual Studio Tools for Office and using C# or VB to develop programs that interact with Microsoft Office and read/write their files. That gave me the idea to develop a program that reads the NASA Space Shuttle mission schedules which was published in Excel, and put the events in Outlook Calendar as calendar appointments. Since others may see the value in the program, I published the code on Codeplex.

    It was a great timesaver for me to follow the remaining Space Shuttle missions on my calendar. Prior to the program, I would only enter significant events, launches, landings, and EVAs, manually in my calendar.

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