Sometimes it’s easy to forget that a lot of the fun of coding – in whatever form that is – is the exploration and discovery of new tools and techniques.
A couple of things that jogged my conscience happened in the last week:
It reminded me that being a master is an aspiration, but all of the fun is in the journey to that point. I think that technologies like WPF and Silverlight lend themselves to the fun of the journey because they’re directly accessible and efficient but have tons of depth and possibility should you wish to master them. Stuff like this.
With that in mind I started thinking about why I got into programming in the first place. (Professionally it’s because I wasn’t dedicated enough to be a doctor, but that’s a different story.) It boils down to a childhood subscription to Zzap64 magazine, which focused on the Commodore 64, and a 4-part article by Andrew Braybrook on the creation of Paradroid (probably one of the best C64 games ever). I’d already bought Gribbly’s Day Out and thought it was brilliant, so reading about a hero building his new game, and then the game turning out as good as it did was just great. And that’s why I started programming.
Braybrook did some other great stuff too (notably for me was Uridium) but it was the Paradroid article that represented the zeitgeist for me as a kid.
I found the diary on an archive site – you can read it here. Looking at again made me nostalgic, but also inspired by the discovery process, and the hacking that is clear through the writing.
I was pleased that Andrew has a Wikipedia page, though I’m hoping that the note that he now works for an insurance firm is code for “is living in gaming paradise for heroes”.
For my part in this, I’ll be doing more coding, and less thinking about the correctness of the approach in the long term: a limiting factor on my fun. Inspiration is a strange thing.
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