The Best Programmer in the World is the One Having the Most Fun

It's hard to constantly reinvent the universe to make it fun again. Oh, look at us, 'young' programmers and admins, our early 30s: how many of us have been doing this stuff for 15 years now? And to already be weary of the daily grind, to have discovered cynicism prematurely. How do I awaken to the realm each morning, doe-eyed and blissful to learn new secrets? This venue is beyond familiar. I think I know the dance moves all my heart. And if there are more to find, my heart has grown too shallow to push blood at my feet to dance. I look in other windows, other professions, and see such ripe opportunities to improve their process. Faulty confidence? To swap careers with another forlorn professional, just long enough to rediscover why programming is indeed a for the young at heart. This weird intersection of procedure and creativity, the nexus of writer's block and chasing the bottom line, how do we keep it all together for the decades to come?

Is there any research to back this sort of popular statement? I am very skeptical of this kind of statement where the author makes up a romanticized story to illustrate his point. This is very similar to the popular &quot;do what you love&quot; blog post that get posted here once every few months.<p>The best programmer I know in person agonizes over his approaches until it satisfies his high level of standard. He is a professional, not an amateur who does his work for fun. Does he have fun when he works? Yes, sometimes, but not all the time.

At this point, I&#x27;ve worked with a ton of programmers. The ones who really stand out, are the ones who enjoy their work. If that person also enjoys coding with others, and the process of improvement, they have unlimited potential.

The <i>happiest</i> programmer is the one having the most fun. And in the case of this article, the best programmer is portrayed as the one who <i>started out</i> having the most fun.<p>This isn&#x27;t just pedantry; I&#x27;ve known a lot of programmers that absolutely loved their work but wrote code that was mediocre or worse, or wrote decent code but couldn&#x27;t structure a project to save their lives.<p>&quot;I have so much fun doing this&quot; doesn&#x27;t immediately imply &quot;I know or seek to know all of the intricacies of this subject.&quot;

The display switch is a fun hack, but even a decade ago I think there were already programs where you could just wag your mouse over to the other screen of a computer. It doesn&#x27;t need a display switch at all, just an app on both computers that passed the input from one to the other over the network under certain situations. Such apps are still used frequently today where people will bring a Macbook Air and an iPad to a hackathon and just use the iPad as a second screen. This became a big thing when everyone had to throw out their old PS&#x2F;2 KVMs for USB ones or just use a software solution.<p>This is true of me too, a lot of times I have fun writing something already done, although it is kind of a sad waste.

I see programmers are mostly concerned, over any other profession, of how good they are at what they do. How to be best. Yet - they are the least understood or recognized for the effort. Anyone else finds it strange?

So true. It&#x27;s simple - playing aroung does open ones mind. It&#x27;s that simple and that hard. But it requires passion - no one will be able to force himself for side project and even if he do, no lesson will be learned. I observe it all the time across my coworkers - those, who like play around with related technologies, are getting better all the time.

I know blissfully ignorant programmers and they&#x27;re not the ones I want on my team.

If I didn&#x27;t enjoy at least some of what I did, I wouldn&#x27;t still be coding after 32 years.

Coding with a smile or not coding at all...