I love coding and I’d argue it is one of the most joyful things to do–it has its rough edges, but still though. If you take joy out of programming it becomes a task, and people often times don’t love tasks, or the obligation there of.
I came from engineering background, with some academia background as well. I could not handle acdemia, I wanted to build stuff. Well, after all i’m a hacker. I love to tweak parameters and play with different settings. Maybe that’s why my career in academia never took off.
If you take joy out of programming, it becomes a task–and i happen to hate tasks.
Now I hear a lot of people complaining about programming and how tough that is. It is tough. But, for me I’d happily keep on doing mostly technical stuff for extra 10 years, and even more. Some wouldn’t do, but for me it is something I’d and I’m looking forward to do. This might seem extremely ridiculuos, esp. to those early career engineers. There is no problem with being a “geek”, or hating meetings and project management terminologies–don’t let them spoil you! That’s ok!
I still enjoy programming. I read and contributed to all of our startup code, I read every single line of code we work on. I love doing that. I’d spend my Friday’s morning reading and learning Android, or Angular code for cashq and cashq web respectively. Programming is joyful.
This year I worked with JS, it was the first I do anything serious with client side stuff. I hate them for so long, but after using React, I felt in love with it! It is the only thing catched my attention after jQuery. React has been very critical for our startup, as it allows us to rapidly prototype and ship–two things I love the most!
you can actually build stuff
Is not this amazing? The idea you can actually build something and others would use? It is exactly like being a mechanical engineer, only that it is so much easier to do.
One of the thing i love most about programming (or coding) is that I could build stuff and people would use it–or not use it at all, but just building them for my own sake! I built cashqbot exactly for this purpose. I use telegram a lot, and i thought it would make sense I build a bot that can help me carry my online payments.
i hate management
There i said it. I hate management, i will never be good at these things. I don’t think myself in any purely management role. For me, being forever technical is actually a nice trajectory in my career! There’s always something new to learn and something new to build.