A tingling sensation in the pit of my stomach, like a small flame that refuses to die as you turn off the gas… This is something I haven’t felt since my first days in college!
The passion for my craft and the pleasure I used to have at practicing it manifested themselves today. I’ve always known they were there, but for some reason they were hidden from my reach.
Through all the jobs I’ve had, I’ve yearned for that feeling to come back, that sheer joy of programming. I’m not talking about the exultation you feel when something that’s been bugging you finally works, like making an SSIS package work properly for example. No, I’m talking about loving the grind we all go through on a daily basis: writing lines of code.
I’ve been working on my behavior driven development skills and learning NHibernate today and it felt like I clicked. I was unable to write code before having written a spec and it eventually made me refactor in a few changes that made my code look… pretty!
I realized that I love doing well designed code. I thrive in such an environment and I’m able to enter the zone: spec-code-test-spec-code-test-spec-code-test… It makes me feel proud of what I did. I look at that big green bar and think that I can go home a happy man tonight. I’ve earned my diner. I feel like I went out of my cave and brought back a juicy mammoth for my family to eat. Aaarh! Something like that, anyway…
I don’t want to go back to my old ways, where passion had no room to expand and was all but extinguished! I shudder just to think of it. I don’t want to let go! I want to fan the flames.
2 comments:
Hey, that's excellent! That's how it should be, I think, as much as possible, anyway.
Congrats!
The drive to code to the best of your ability is always the best thing to have when coding. Once you go BDD you never go back. Now if only we could figure out the way to ignite that spark whenever we needed, or how to keep the burning desire to code last indefinitely.
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