About programming

02.05.2009 09:45 ·  Notes  ·  thoughts

Programming has always fascinated me. When I was a kid, I was introduced to programming, first with Basics (I wrote programs to draw snowmen, cars, and other stuff), then Pascal, and on and on it went. One thing led to another, and after Pascal I learned C. After all that, playing computer games was no fun at all. This is probably one of the reasons why, for me, a computer is first and foremost a tool and not a game console, as it was for most of my friends and classmates.

Anyway, I never became a professional programmer, although I did get a second degree in the subject. The reasons for this are a topic for another post.

However, I did not give up programming. During my work in the regional branch of the State Land Cadastre Centre, I developed a system for maintaining a cadastral plan based on ArcView 3.2. Later, I tried (unsuccessfully) several times to present my own program — an automated system for the cadastre — to my superiors. I also write some small programs from time to time, both for work and for myself. And recently I made and sent a patch to the developers of the free file manager DoubleCommander. Not a big deal, just a small improvement, but the fact that it (the patch) was approved and included in the main tree is still pleasant. Almost at the same time, I had an idea for another improvement, which I plan to implement in code in the near future.

What is happening to me is, on the one hand, joyful. It’s experience, it’s practice, it’s growth. But on the other hand… I never noticed this before. Well, I wrote a small utility to automate some tasks, then I wrote another one… But there was no stable and constant desire to dig into the sources, fix something, add new functionality, make patches, follow the tracker. Am I sick?