What do you like about programming?

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I've got a bit of love/hate going on with it right now.

The love part:

- When I actually know what I'm doing i can do my job reliably and do as good of a job as I want.

The handful of things I hate about it:

- Working with Angular 4 and Typescript right now, and trying to incorporate that reliably with something like .Net Core MVC is hell. So many npm and VS studio updates threaten to overturn the apple cart and from one weak to the next it doesn't seem like you'll know which way of building your web pack will actually yield a working base to start from for your project. In that sense you don't know from one week to the next what will break and, after it breaks, it could be weeks to months before anyone has a worthwhile article written about how to fix the problem. You might be able to figure it out with a week or two of back-breaking effort if you've been programming for a decade or more, if you're a newbie charged with this sort of responsibility you're toast.

- Dealing with third party developers who you outsource user components of your work to. You can be stuck giving a client a half-baked product that has broken components all because the company you're with made promises to a client in areas that it had no control over, ie. the state of the third party software, and that third party is dragging ass in keeping up with npm, .Net Core, etc. and consequently there are gaps from a month to several months between the third party packages being broken by new changes and those same third party packages getting fixed. It's a world of instant gratification these days so your clients will be inclined to, for all the understandable reasons, like at *you* like your dirt.


I think this gets back to my whole attitude on being in the work world in general. I love being able to do a great job and deliver, through my own efforts and accountability, exactly what people asked for. I absolutely hate getting beaten up for things that are beyond my control or being pushed to take out a whip and self-mortify for other people's failed commitments and I still haven't found a profession, out of the several I've been in, where you don't have this being a constant mixed bag.

I enjoy programming when I actually have the motivation to do it. I wouldn't want to do it as a career as that would stop the enjoyment of it stone dead I think.

Unfortunately I don't have much of an imagination so I usually make remakes of old 8-bit games, rather than coding something more original - if such a thing even exists any more. They say there is nothing new under the sun and it certainly seems more true than not about games.

It's a nice creative outlet non the less though and I wish I could get back into it again as I haven't really done much since being on my latest round of anti-depressants.

If anyone is remotely curious my games can be found if you search for TCKSOFT on Google Play.

Telling a machine to do stuff. That, of course, is the fundamental nature of programming, and it is why I am interested in assembly (or to be specific: AT&T syntax AMD64, Unix System V ABI).

What i like about it: Problem solving and creating something new from scratch.

I see programming as a tool for doing analytics, parsing data to other formats, identifying data structures etc. Haven't coded in a while but felt like starting something up again, currently have no ideas for a home dev project. Maybe something with security, databases, network captures and datavis, all subjects which i love to play with.

What i don't like about it:

1. The rate of diversification. There is simply too many languages and frameworks to learn, it's like something new pops up every day that you have to spend time to look at if it is something you should pick up and add to your skill set.

2. Cloud/web apps. People forget that there are benefits to writing stand alone apps that don't run on a server, i.e. if you are out in the field doing forensics, the last thing you want to hear is web app since you need to be isolated and run everything in your own secure environment/domain to not compromise the investigation, also if you run something really CPU intensive like processing a couple of terabytes of data, you have to share CPU time with others and unless you have a cluster with 128 core i7 with multiple PCI Express disks in raid and dynamic system resource allocation, that is not going to fly for specific tasks. Any sales person who says that "One size does fit all" for analytics is full of BS. That is why i still code stand alone software, there is enough people "with their heads stuck in the cloud" already.