Feeling GREAT!

Just wanted to let you all know I'm FEELING GRRRREAT!

My program wouldn't run, then I synced mods, and it ran! w00t!

Does programming make you guys feel elated and awesome sometimes? I know for me, after fighting a difficult bug (and winning) or playing something that 2 hours ago was just imagination thrills me, and makes me feel great!

I don't ever want to program as a faceless cog working on MS Office 2089, there's something about programming my own projects, dorm-room kung-fu coding, that just makes me feel awesome! Anyone else just LOVE the coding they do?


w00t I feel great!

I miss those feelings I used to get when I started out with programming. Those moments when I looked at the screen and wondered "Did I do that? For real?? Cool!"

So you're the one that stole my happiness. Give it back.

http://www.jengajam.com/r/nutrigrain_ad/jz

Oh man! That nutrigrain commercial gets me every time! Is it real or was it a student project or something? Either way its one of the funniest things on the internet.

That was a real commercial, I'm sure I saw it on TV a few times.

Will, I think you and I are a rare breed.
Though it's a bit embarrassing to tell it, I sometimes
get excited to the point of giddiness when I'm really into it.
That will go away, right? I'd hate to be working at
some company and being stared at for laughing out
loud because my new gel-map algorithm looks
so cool.

I'm not a very emotional person really. I enjoy bettering myself and I enjoy achieving things, but I don't buzz at the seems when something works. I think my motivation for coding is the desire for the end product.

I used to be scared of heights, so I climbed a mountain. I think that about sums me up.

I love it when I've spent several days coding, adding something substantial and then it compiles first time. WOO!
Ok, it may not actually work properly first time round but at least you didn't have to fix and correct about 50 spelling mistakes and many 'copy and paste' attacks of incorrect code. :)

I know I'll be feeling great once I get my damn head around this code I'm trying to work with in Java....

Just this past weekend I got the buzz when I wrote the AI for enemies in my game. The usual pattern is a rush of egomania as I fill up with the sense that it's the best work I've ever done, and then I go play videogames or read for a while, and then I come back to do more work.

Frankly, I'm a little concerned that my enthusiasm for programming will wane once it all becomes routine for me. That's pretty much what happened with 3D art; I used to get really excited when I model, but now it just kinda bores me.

Then again, my friend and collaborator on digital artwork keeps coming up with wacked out things for me to program, so hopefully it won't ever become routine.

I'm at that point right now. There's no technical challenge waiting for me to solve that I am interested in solving, and i'd have to try very hard to find some technical concept I havn't previously addressed - the last thing I did was Homeworld style vector trails, as soon as I finished it I had nothing left to do and without the hurdle of descovery for the past month or so i've done no programming at all since.

I wouldn't mind getting into bone based animation, but Blitz3D lacks commands to access any of it, aside from that I can't seem to find anything that inspires me.

As I alluded to, my solution is to branch out from technical obstacles and tackle conceptual ones as well. I'm looking for the art in programming. But then again, my friend hits me with technical challenges too. I shouldn't say too much, but you know what we're doing right now? Augmented reality! How's that for a technical challenge!

I'm sorry Becky, that sounds kinda lousy. I feel just like the guy in that Nutrigrain commercial around 1/8th of the time :D I think I can enjoy coding so much because I have loads of college work to do - so its mentally tied with being a creative vacation from writing essays for me. It sounds like people are advising me not to get a coding job if I want to keep enjoying it, is that generally true?

In my psychology class we were discussing motivations, current psychology holds that:

There are intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, intrinsic are things you do because you like doing them, like eating, extrinsic are things you do because you want to get to an intrinsic motivation, like making money to buy food to eat.

There is a phenomena that has been pretty heavily observed called overcompensation or something, where if you give someone an extrinsic motivation for something that is intrinsically motivating for them, you destroy the intrinsic motivation. In the study they took a bunch of kids who liked to draw - leave these kids in a room with some crayons and they would just draw all the time. They gave half the kids a dollar everytime they did a drawing. Soon, that half didn't want to draw anymore, and after the study still didn't like to draw (they did this sometime in the 70s, I don't think you could do under modern ethical psychology standards nowadays.)

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that maybe you guys don't like to code as much because it is your job, and extrinsic motivation has pushed away the intrinsic motivation for it?

Maybe try to compartmentalize your work coding and your hobby coding and think of them as different, work on some projects only at home and for free, and it might help?

Your knowledge of psychology clearly hasn't got to the stage where you find out that the process of being psycho-analysed is like being mentally raped, and therefore is an extremely rude thing to do.

Unfortunately in this instance, you're probably right.

Losing all interest in coding is pretty common, I think. I've been through spells of this lasting years. I always end up coming back to it, though - damn it!

My spell lasted 10 years. It finished 6 months ago.

being psychoanalyzed is like being mentally raped... hahahaha... wo... that's the first time i've heard it put in such dramatic, if unimaginable terms...

would it be improper of me to inquire as to what being mentally raped would consist of...

i can't imagine anything that would constitute such a thing... i mean, short of a lobotomy... and, that still doesn't fit...

--Mike

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Skull@#!*ed

EDIT: darnit, the forum censor screwed up the URL

I loved Blitz on the Amiga and as I learnt more on it got to the point where I replaced most of the blitz code with assembler. It allowed me to "get something done" and then improve technically while still being rewarded with progress.

Since I've tried to get back into programming I've been bewildered just trying to get something done in c++. Rendering a cube just had me baffled. Since buying Blitz3d (which is *amazing*), I have actually managed to create a spinning Earth with a camera I can move through 3d space while it tracks the planet. I've answered so many questions that I had but never been able to answer without struggling to do even simple things in 3d.

It's all baby-steps at the moment but at least with Blitz, you get rewarded early but there is clearly so much more scope for taking things to the next level.

I don't nessecarilly think so. I've been programing professionally for about 8 years and as a hobby, since I was 9, only with a short break where I was unable to find a suitable hobby language on the PC, (comming from AmiBlitz). Also for some reason the PC seems to be absolutely destructive for creativity.

The big challenge in programing is not IMHO one of technical excellence (that's more like computer assisted math) but rather one of design. I think Joe is probably right about "Art in programming", and if that's your angle, you'll never get tired of it, as the pursuit of perfection in art is a Sisiphos work.