Regular Monday Sniping

My latest article is up on CodeSnipers.com. I'm still with the mistakes for now, so head over and read Micro ISV Mistake #3.

Also of interest on CodeSnipers is John Haren's latest, The Notorious J.O.B. Posted on Friday, it really struck a chord with me, and I've been trying to figure out what to add to it ever since. I think it basically boils down to the awkward relationship between elitism and self-confidence. The web tends to multiply the problem. If we compare ourselves to the people we know or can physically see, we can probably find something we're the best at, or the most obsessive about. Using the web we can compare ourselves to the whole world, which tends to land us in categories or groups, rather than out on our own. This should be a great thing, because it means we can connect with all kinds of people who actually know what we're talking about. To 99% of the people I meet, I either write software, or sometimes even just do "something with computers". Thanks to the web, I can talk to thousands of people who actually know what I mean when I tell them exactly what I'm doing, talk about what I did that day, or try to discuss my problems.

It's at this point that elitism and self-confidence (or lack of) come along and mess up the whole thing. I don't know which comes first, and I don't know which does the most harm, but I do know that the combination of the two can do real damage inside your head.

Like John, I love this work, but I don't want to do 80 hour or 7-day weeks of coding eternally. I want to produce beautiful software without killing myself or neglecting my family. A 12+ hour coding day might seem like a good idea at the time, but rarely do you look back on the resulting code with fondness. The majority of the times I've overworked myself it's only resulted in more work later, it's usually just not possible to force it and still produce something of quality.

Also like John, I like to think I'm good at what I do, but it would be so easy to let the acheivements of others have a negative impact on me. Do I take pride in the software I've produced, or do I get all insecure because some 12 year old wrote a new compiler in his sleep, while I've been doing this for 10 years and have barely touched C++.

The answer is easy, I feel good about everything I know and everything I've acheived. It's easier said than done, but it's important to try.