I, Bugsmasher

20 Apr 2006

It is what I do. When I go to a new place I always find errors in their systems. The teams generaly don’t believe that it is an error in their code. I can relate to that. There is a general “I wrote that. It has to be perfect.” arrogance that seems to go with the programming territory.

Myself, I don’t really care. If something is going wrong I always check my code first. I know I make mistakes. If you see me do something wrong, or you know a better way to do something, please, I beg you, let me know. How else would I ever learn?

Just three weeks into my time here I found an error in some of the core code shared among many titles. A farely big bug that tramples memory under fairly common circumstances. It took a week for them to verfiy, accept, and find a solution for the error.

I love it though. Hunting for bugs and smashing them. Sometimes I think I should start a consulting company that specializes in finding and fixing errors in software solutions.

Most consultants write custom software solutions or adapt current solutions to a companies specific needs. That kind of work really doesn’t appeal to me though. Mostly because when I see something that is wrong I am compelled to fix it.

When I was working at my last job I honestly felt like I was becoming a worse programmer every single day. Like I was degenerating. I am very happy to find that was not the case. I just wasn’t challenged in any way there. Now that I have a challenge things are clicking again. All of the ability and knowledge is still there. The hunger to learn and improve has been renewed.

I’m really happy here so far. Although I still have to say that my dream job is being able to work from home or wherever I may happen to be at any point in time. I like the idea of being able to set my own schedule. If I wanted to stay up until 3 am and start at noon the next day there wouldn’t be any repercussions.

Maybe I need to sell off the bulk of my posessions. Hole up in some tiny apartment. Take a sabbatical from this “work” thing and finally write that damn book. That elemental sinew of creativity that keeps pulling me inside out.

The little voice in the back of my head that keeps whispering “There must be more” just never shuts up. No matter how far I go, how much I do, or how much I get; it is always there whispering. Telling me not to stop. A greedy little id have I.