Jeremiah Cornelius's Journal: Programming for over 20 years and love every minute of it

I have been programming for over 20 years and love every minute of it. So far I was lucky to work for small, startup companies, or consulting, always doing stuff I haven't done before, always new challenges. The skills do accumulate, so I have become quicker when jumping into new languages, systems and interfaces.

I have done just about anything that's out there, from modem and hard drive firmware (even in machine code for strange, primitive processors), to operating systems, multiprocessor job control systems, specialized libraries for programmers, web filtering (designed and coded Cyber Patrol in the early days of Netscape), Windows, Linux and OSX/iOS high speed networking, servers & clients for variety of protocols from specs & from scratch (such as http, dns, smtp, snmp) peer to peer systems,device drivers, compression programs (for graphics & audio, compressed data bases), GPS servers and clients, smart screen magnifiers for users with poor vision and input methods for motorically handicapped (e.g. Morse code via puffs or blinks or cheek twitches), golfing application for iPhone (e.g. measures slope & distance to hole, suggests club, kind & direction of swing, shows trajectories), remote PC desktop & remote webcams control/view for clients in Java, Javascript, iPhone native code, tele-conferencing system, software & firmware for Data Center switches and routers,...

The translation of required behaviors into algorithmic patterns, then of those into code, has become second nature, it just flows without thinking, like talking or breathing air. Debugging is fun, too, like solving new puzzles, or like detective solving a murder mystery.

The most enjoyableis the initial nurturing of a program from a little seed, laying out classes and data structures, simulating their behaviours in the mental models of the system I am looking to create. If you learn how to do that right, the program grows like a network (a graph with adaptable links, functioning just like human brain), a live being with intelligence of its own unfolding by itself in perfect harmony, like fertilized egg growing into a newborn baby, with my brain acting as its substratum, my fingers as its fingers. Once that phase takes off, it becomes completely effortless on my part. I don't even need to think any more, the network thinks it through better than I ever could, it knows exactly what it needs, where it should go, and it merely "asks" me what to do next.

http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message2141011/pg10#36163787

Indeed

[smittyoneeach]

It's like a chess match, with the various system components as pieces. A good solution is a checkmate.