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Some days it's hard to really appreciate what a software developer is or does. And I have "been one" for over a quarter of a century and I still don't know what I do.

I can translate management speak into meaningful English and then understand what "they need" as opposed to "what they think they need."

I can translate "business requirements" into an internal mental model composed of data stores and processes and subsequently translate that model into "working code" in any language you care to mention to produce a "deliverable".

But...

I still don't truly understand what happened along the way. I think it is more to do with the underlying nature of the universe rather than the mechanical processes. Codds rules and normalisation for instance, one can learn, understand and apply these rules to great effect but what does "de-normalisation to 2NF" mean to a bunch of atoms and molecules which don't actually exist because they themselves are composed of mere collapsing wave-functions and statistical probababilities.

Yes, I am having an other "reality challenging" day brought about by the mind-numbing futility of my current development task. As I sit here and stare at my lovely HD flat-panel monitor I see not words and Erlang terms but tens of thousands of coloured pixels, some of which appear as I strike the plastic rectangular input device attached to the quantum reality manipulation device.

 To quote a rather famous publication, "In the beginning was the word.". A word is a sound. A sound is a vibration. Current interpretations of what's "out there" are telling us that vibration is truly all that there might be, albeit in nine or ten dimensions and composed of "strings".

Wow.

No wonder I can't figure out any of this stuff... it's all made from string and it's all tangled up... maybe it's all composed of "knot" gates. ROFLCOPTER etc.

Ah well, back to work... whatever that is.

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