thehowe_v7.1

Over the past 6 months I've started reading some good computer science / programming / software engineering blogs. Looking back over my own posts, I realized recently that my chosen profession is not a topic I have actually ever written about in any detail. A non-zero number of my peers maintain blogs where they talk about all kinds of interesting aspects of the field and projects that interest them. Why don't I do the same?

I've decided that the reason is that, while I do enjoy computer science, I don't love it. At least, not with the passion that some do. Sure, I enjoy the intellectual challenges and puzzles involved with coding. Sure, I can get excited about seemingly bizarre things like "elegant" code. Sure, I can get into long, drawn out debates about coding styles, algorithm design, and the like. But, and this I think is the key difference, at the end of the day I get to a point where I just have to stop. I like it just fine, but I can only take so much of it.

It's because I can only take so much thinking about computer science that I don't write about it, I think. I'm in school; I practically spend all day every day thinking about designing software and the various problems associated with it. In my free time, the times which I post to this blog, the last thing I want to do is think about it some more.

Does that make me a bad code artist? Maybe. Probably. People who have that twenty-four hour passion for all things programming are going to be better than I am, merely by the fact that they spend so much more time thinking about it.

On the other hand, I think that not being so obsessive is going to make me a better person. There are, after all, only 24 hours in a day. By not spending all of them thinking about code, I'll free up brain-time for other interests, making me, I hope, a more well-rounded individual.