Something came over me today after I woke up. Perhaps it was a lack of caffeine and savage hour for me to wake up and I’ve decided to write this post with lil bit info about me and my attitude at solving things.
My recent conversation with Sabrina Dent was a trigger for that I guess, when she said I have tendency to approaching things with a rocket launcher, but it works.
When it comes to programming, it’s not just a piece of code I’m writing. Most of the time I’m approaching it quite personally. I like my code to be ‘clean’, easy to read and modify. It’s like I’m creating art.
I like playing guitar and piano. I’ve never spent time learning how to play so I can’t really play much beside few songs. I used to sketch and paint, but again I’ve never gave it enough time to become good at it. Never less I liked it (I still like to doodle — it’s stronger than me 
)
This inner passion to art got transferred somehow to my career as a programmer. I like nice things.
I’ve also been a fan of assumption that programming is by all means a modern magic. After all you can make things work, do some things with just words you type, and 99% of Earth’s population can’t do it or even fully grasp it. So it seems like you could at some level compare programming to a fantasy magic :)
When I play RPG games I like to choose characters that give me most freedom of expression. No wonder that most of the time I play mages, wizards and such.
Some time ago I’ve played Never Winter Nights 2 over LAN with a ‘fireball-happy’ attitude mage. This lead to many funny situations (at least for me 
) like
“Why did you kill this guy?!!” — friend asks
“Well, he attacked us first.” — I answer
“But he wanted to surrender! And we needed him for new quest!!”
“So? I had already two fireballs flying in his direction”
So how does it portray me? I guess I’m kind of code casting passionate artist :)
No wonder that when I approach a project I like to solve the problems in ‘best’ way possibly.
Picking fireball to open locked doors and crates happened a lot in mentioned above NWN2 session :)
My enthusiasm to designing and tendency to over engineering leads my customers to wonder sometimes if things will get done on time. I do get things done in time… most of the time
It’s not because I’m blasting my way through problems with crude solutions, it’s because I tend to see a clear way and I know tools that I can use effectively.
Multi-tasking is not my thing. I doubt it’s any man’s thing. That’s what women are good at. When I concentrate on one thing it gets 120% of my attention. Nothing around me exists any more. Dog can bark, radio can play some bad tunes, roadwork in progress and my girlfriend calling for dinner — all gone. It’s me and the task before me. And that’s why I can solve things well.
Last year taught me that when I plan to do 2-3 projects over the same period of time it’s my max capacity to mullti-task and still get things done as I tend to underestimate the overhead from switching between the tasks.
I have lots of great ideas, just not enough time to implement them and I hope to increase my time for them in 2009.
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