random work observation of the week
Oct. 8th, 2005 01:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jaeclecticI miss programming. It's kind of stupid, because I don't think I'm really all that good at it (compared to people who actually do it for a living), but I really do like coding. It engages some part of my brain that doesn't get used in the same way otherwise.
For example: around 3:30 yesterday afternoon, I had finished a couple of design sketches (in HTML), one of which required a bit of dynamic behavior that was almost but not quite trivial. I could easily just have done 4 different copies of the HTML file illustrating the 4 different states, but I decided to actually code the javascript instead, mainly because I was just feeling tired and bored and unmotivated, so I didn't care if it was the most efficient thing to do.
This involved: trying to copy & edit an existing function and failing; trying to copy some snippets found on the interweb, which were probably out of date and not quite on target anyway, and also failing; belatedly remembering that I ought to be looking at the javascript console, e.g. to make sure I hadn't done something really dumb like name the function something singular and attempt to invoke it with the same name but plural (detection of this particular error was hindered by the fact that I was trying to edit code in dreamweaver, instead of switching into a text editor where I could easily have looked at two places in the code side-by-side); went and looked at reference books on the O'Reilly site to get the information that I actually needed; wrote the code required in a manner obviously neither efficient nor reusable, but hey it worked!
The effect of which was: An hour and a half whizzed by, I was completely engaged by what I was doing, and despite the sillyness of it all, felt rather satisfied at the end.
And the moral of the story? Nothing I didn't know already: The perfect job for me would involve a mix of tasks that don't exactly line up with any job description I've ever seen. C'est la guerre.
Oh, and if I don't actually work with stuff like this on a regular basis, my skills (such as they are) will erode to the point of genuine uselessness. Since if I was in practice, it would NOT have taken an hour and a half to write a tiny piece of almost-trivial code!
For example: around 3:30 yesterday afternoon, I had finished a couple of design sketches (in HTML), one of which required a bit of dynamic behavior that was almost but not quite trivial. I could easily just have done 4 different copies of the HTML file illustrating the 4 different states, but I decided to actually code the javascript instead, mainly because I was just feeling tired and bored and unmotivated, so I didn't care if it was the most efficient thing to do.
This involved: trying to copy & edit an existing function and failing; trying to copy some snippets found on the interweb, which were probably out of date and not quite on target anyway, and also failing; belatedly remembering that I ought to be looking at the javascript console, e.g. to make sure I hadn't done something really dumb like name the function something singular and attempt to invoke it with the same name but plural (detection of this particular error was hindered by the fact that I was trying to edit code in dreamweaver, instead of switching into a text editor where I could easily have looked at two places in the code side-by-side); went and looked at reference books on the O'Reilly site to get the information that I actually needed; wrote the code required in a manner obviously neither efficient nor reusable, but hey it worked!
The effect of which was: An hour and a half whizzed by, I was completely engaged by what I was doing, and despite the sillyness of it all, felt rather satisfied at the end.
And the moral of the story? Nothing I didn't know already: The perfect job for me would involve a mix of tasks that don't exactly line up with any job description I've ever seen. C'est la guerre.
Oh, and if I don't actually work with stuff like this on a regular basis, my skills (such as they are) will erode to the point of genuine uselessness. Since if I was in practice, it would NOT have taken an hour and a half to write a tiny piece of almost-trivial code!