GRAW or sux0r
I’m fresh home from work, I’ve got a bit of time to myself as the kids have just gone to bed. I’ve got a number of choices as to what I do. I could watch TV. Watch a movie. Read a novel. Or something else. The top contenders on my list right now are to play a PC game (Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter) that I was hooked on before Christmas and haven’t had the time to play since then, or to write some software.
Today I found sux0r, it’s an RSS aggregator with a Baysean filter built in so it learns to categorise the posts I read. It’s pretty neat and with a bit of work I could have it trained to read all the BBC news feeds for me and only pass on the things I am interested in, so I don’t have to keep skipping the sports or international politics and can concentrate on UK news, tech, science and health.
It doesn’t quite work how I would like, so I’ve been glancing at the source and considering making some enhancements and submitting a patch back to the core project.
When I left for work this morning however, I faithfully promised that this evening would be dedicated to slacking off and doing something purely to relax. But all I want to do now is sit and hack away at an open source piece of software. To code. Which is my normal work.
I’m not alone, Eric Sink, the founder and a core developer at SourceGear posted this in his blog the other day:
A few weeks ago I saw an enticing little flash game on Reddit. It’s called Virus. After playing it just a couple of times, I wished that it had a solver. It took me 25 turns to win that round? How fast could a computer do it with 3 levels of look-ahead?
That night, the question was still nagging me. The kids are in bed. My wife turned in early. Should I pop in a DVD and watch X-Men 3 again? Or, I wonder how quickly I could clone that Flash game?
Eric choose to sit and re-invent a flash game to prove he could. And a few nights later, he ditched Citizen Kane in favour of writing a Poker hand comparison algorithm.
On the surface of it, this may seem like strange behaviour to non-programmers. We’re at home. We could be doing something for relaxation, instead we’re working. But that’s the point. For a lot of real programmers, we do it because that’s what we love to do. Footballers play football because they love the sport. We code because we love to.
At the end of the day, working on your own problems for your own interest is a real buzz. It’s the problem solving. The challenge.
If you don’t get this, then you’re in the wrong job. People who aren’t enjoying it, aren’t relishing the challenge and wanting to stretch themselves can be programmers, but they won’t reach the same heights that someone who is driven to program can.
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1 year, 6 months ago on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Development, Opinion.
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