Programming Should Be Fun Again
I was a smart kid from a working class town who had a great 5th grade teacher named Donald Lack. The year was 1983 and the Apple IIe had just been released with 64kb RAM and a floppy disk. I was a few chapters ahead in math and working on a project for our gifted and talented program. The project was a video game I was programming in Basic, a language I learned by reading the manuals for my uncle Mike’s Apple IIe. So while Mr. Lack was teaching the math lesson, he would let me work on the school’s new Apple IIe in the AV closet. The game didn’t do much in the end but move a few pieces of flaming coal down a conveyor belt, but it sparked a love of programming in me that would last.
Around the same time period I also developed a love of music. My father owned a Martin acoustic guitar and would play it for us while my mother was at work waiting tables. I started picking up his guitar and later taught myself to play the saxophone. As a musician I’ve always loved to improvise. It’s such a great feeling when you’re in the groove and creating in the moment. I feel the same way about programming. Your style varying with your mood and sense of urgency. Sometimes it’s neat and clean, sometimes it’s hacked together, but still structurally sound. Either way it’s fun to see what useful tools you can build from nothing, out of nothing but bits.
The problem is, this all has to change for a person to reach their full potential in any creative pursuit. We have to work with others with external deadlines that don’t always work with our creative flow. But just like in any field, to succeed is to adapt and overcome those challenges. Some might give in to doing things like everyone else, but as a creative person, you look for solutions. You define new ways of working or build tools to automate the mundane but required tasks.
That’s why I build tools like imdone-atom and imdone.io. To help me get back to the things that matter. To make life easy. It just also happens to be something I love doing.
