Today's Epiphany

I love today. Not because of work, friends, health, family, or exercise. Simply because I learned something new about me. What did I learn? I learned that I know a few things and that I don't know everything. I know that I can code in any language. I can solve most coding problems. I enjoy more of problem solving process errors than coding problems. Coding is easy. I can teach anyone to "code". But only with experience can you see the bigger picture of things... how that little piece of code interacts with everything else in this MASSIVE code base? So many things... But here is the big realization... college teaches us how to write CLEAN code... from scratch, ground up, beautiful code. I had a professor who inspired me not by guiding me down a path in a nice way, but by telling me my code was crap and I am better than that, and handing me my first F in any computer class EVER. I got a 98 on my next one. :-) Now writing this, college students don't know how to write code for real companies. I have been a developer for almost 20 years and I think I have written one project from scratch. I have written almost all of my code to add to some existing code base, fix a bug, add a new feature, etc... Why don't they have some massive code and say, you have 2 weeks to add this new feature, oh and the code was written in technology about 7 years ago and you can't change the database because the client has customized it. THAT is reality. That is what I do. That is why I like solving those problems.... So the epiphany is this, I love my life, and I like solving problems, process based problems. Code is easy and it is my comfort zone, but I want to do more than that. I love explaining to others, I love gathering people together and hashing out a solution with others. I don't need to be the one to write the solution, just contribute to it. Today is a good day for that reason alone. I'm out for now, and off to dinner. Thanks for stopping by.