Code Junkie

Announcer: From the EIP Chipotle Operations Center in East County, San Diego, it’s time for another thrilled-packed excursion into Programming Excellence on I Built His Cage!

Welcome to the final post of the ’00s, a decade I still maintain should have been pronounced “twenty-oh-” instead of “two thousand-”. Let’s think back on twenty-oh-nine for this blog. Do you remember any of those coding projects I started? Remember Hydrocon? What about the Ropes h’yung?

Like The Project, they too have stalled. We can speculate on why, but I’ve already done that.

What I’ve observed about myself since starring as the code captain of a largely green-field project with a non-trivial amount of new code to write is something that I already knew: I need my fix. Unless I’m on vacation, and even sometimes when I’m on vacation, I need my coding fix, and if I don’t get it at work, I will seek an outlet at home.

Learn or burn

Ever heard of the ACM Software Engineering Code of Ethics? The eighth bullet point always stood out to me:

8. SELF – Software engineers shall participate in lifelong learning regarding the practice of their profession and shall promote an ethical approach to the practice of the profession.

This is as altruistic as it is practical. I wouldn’t want to end up like this poor guy on reddit: My skills are outdated and I’m out of work. Where do I go from here?

Certainly, I have railed against developers who lack passion. And I hope you’ll agree that I am no hypocrite on this.

Walking Big, Talking Small

There are too many programming languages. Too many of them are just different ways of saying the same thing. The ultimate example of this is VB.NET and C#.NET. As far as I know, anything you can express in one you can express in the other.

The abundance of seemingly redundant languages led me to focus on programming concepts, algorithms, and software design as the main focus of my idle curiosity. Being language-agnostic, these endeavors can apply in any environment, so this had the extra stink of productivity.

It is quite typical of an ISTJ, like myself, to focus on design efforts. Those ISTJers “do best in a career in which they can use their excellent organizational skills and their powers of concentration to create order and structure.”