I’m a passionate person, pouring my heart and soul into everything I do, including my profession as a software developer. I don’t just sit around and write IF statements and loops all day (like we did in college), or SELECT statements, or lame SVN commit messages (although sometimes those slip out when I’m not looking). I’m not in this for the money, prestige, or political power.
For me, it’s about the thrill of the chase.
I’m a lover of mysteries with a penchant for puzzles and an addiction to problem solving. The fires of this passion were first stoked when, at the age of twelve, I discovered the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes and ravenously devoured the entire series of whodunits in record time. Like a hound fresh on the trail of his quarry, I followed the clues with an electric anticipation, attempting to deduce the solution to the puzzle, the question, the mystery before it was revealed. Unfortunately and alas, this led to a rather unrequited love affair with a fictional character, whose brain I was hopelessly smitten with. But at twelve, those things are bound to happen and I got over the fact that we could never be together.
This first affair with mystery set me on an irrevocable path toward problem solving–a path that has been refined through the years by the fine-tuning inherent in studious endeavors. In high school, the passion burst to life again when I began studying chemistry, particularly the periodic table of elements. I remember being fascinated with the fact that the structure and order of the periodic table allowed scientists to deduce the existence and properties of elements that had yet to be actually discovered. Equations and their answers, math and the problems presented, never failed to catapult me into the thrill of the chase in pursuit of their answer.
Since then, leisure time for me has always included some kind of puzzle or game, from crosswords to sudoku to scrabble to boggle to jigsaws to reading stories and watching them unfold. What I find so appealing about a puzzle is not only the pure satisfaction that answering it brings, but also the pleasure experienced in pursuit of that answer. In this sense, the journey is just as important and rewarding as the end. I think Thomas Aquinas put it best when he said that play is valuable because we do it for its own sake, and the result of play is joy. At least, he said something like that. And he’s right.
So what does this have to do with writing code? Everything. Coding is formulating solutions, it is building structures, it is conducting them in a symphony of harmonious accord. Architecture is akin to a tetris puzzle where every piece has its optimal place. Debugging is like following the threads of a mystery, picking up clues until the culprit is apprehended. Production support can be data sleuthing toward an answer. Yes, some parts of development can be tedious, boring, maddening; but then the challenge becomes turning those aspects of it into opportunities for discovery and growth. The passion is in the fun of it.