I had forgotten the thrill of the zone...

Years ago I was a hard-core coder. Give me a good problem to solve and the world around me would vanish as I created the solutions. It was great stimulation for my brain and not a bad way to make a living. I recall fondly the days of writing compression/decompression routines in X86 assembler under very tight memory conditions with ksader. (BTW: Welcome, Keith! Glad you could join us!) Even with the long nights of sitting around waiting on other people with theslice weren't so bad because there were quite a few tricky problems to keep me interested. As I moved on in life and up in my career I ended up in a place where I do more system administration and less coding. For a while now I've been pretty bored and unhappy at work. I felt that I had reached the end of this field and have been looking around for something else.

This past week I've been modifying an open source project called to fit internal requirements here at the office. The feature requested required a significant change* in the underlying data model, so without much support and in a severe time crunch I changed the entire application to meet the needs of co-workers. I finished tonight's tasks on my list I realized that the last two weeks I've actually enjoyed coming into the office and working. Ah-ha! It's not the field that's been boring me, it's the type of work I've been doing. Well at least I know the problem and I can start making choices to move back in the direction I prefer. I can't get out of the sys admin stuff completely, but I'm going to start pushing for other projects and working on some automation to minimize the amount of time I need to spend monitoring systems.

Damn, I feel good! I have a loving wife, a baby on the way, and my job doesn't suck for once.

* I am going to try and package my changes to submit them to the project developers, but it might be far too radical a change for their goals. Best case, they incorporate my changes in a future release. Worst case, they don't accept them and then I'll look at forking the project and releasing my own version. I've been given permission to contribute fixes and enhancements to open source projects we use at work, but I don't have permission yet for releasing my own projects. This is new ground here at work and I've had real positive results so I expect I'll get the permission. After all, what I'm working on doesn't involve any of the company products or technology.