The Adventures of Emacs the Viking

Total experience to date: thirty-one years. Started with UCSD Pascal and Z80 assembler. Currently into Haskell and Prolog and anything functional. Putting all that to one side, as we all know that the language you use to implement a solution is by and large irrelevant, no really, you know it is… I find myself lately finding it harder and harder to want to embark on any sort of personal project. A mere twenty years ago I was brimming with enthusiasm for it but these days I just find myself wanting to watch cat videos on YouTube. Initially... I was spell-bound (and to some extent still am) at the age of eleven that you could “express an idea” in the language that the computer could understand, be it BASIC or whatever was available and then sometime later have that idea executing. Of course, the idea has to be information processing centric; that’s what the infernal machines do so well. Eventually... I realised that you could express solutions using any number of techniques rang...

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...

Some days this job is so hard. No amount of soothing music, coffee, snacks, socks off etc. manages to bring your head back into that "special place", some call it the "zone". Today is one of those days. Perhaps it stems from the fact that I find myself having to work on something that is just looking pretty pointless right now. Not even the fact that it's Erlang seems to be lifting my spirits today, not even the fact that I don't have to touch PHP with a barge pole is even raising a smile. So what is the difference between a "good day" and a "bad day" as a developer? You'd think that after twenty-six years doing it I'd have some idea. I think it relates to a sense of purpose and corresponding sense of achievement. When you perceive that your efforts are actually not going to be in vain; when you perceive that you are being "useful", "effective" and ultimately that you as a person are being "valued...