I vividly remember interviewing for my second software developer job and being asked "what technologies are you interested in right now?"
My answer was something like "I'm not really that interested in technology, I'm more interested in what can be done with it". With the rise of AI, I've realised I was wrong, or at least partially.
Going back many years, I was always interested in computers, fueled by the desire to bypass restrictions so I could play Runescape and other online games on our home computer. I infected it with malware and ransomware a handful of times trying to use "free coin generators" for Habbo Hotel, and so learned to clean things up quickly with the hope that no one would notice.
In secondary school, my IT teacher Mr Alam encouraged me to join CC4G (computer club for girls), and that's where I got my first exposure to programming. I remember being very excited after making my first website using Adobe Dreamweaver - a page with a vomit green background that's now lost to time.
Later, my interest drew me towards an IT support apprenticeship. It was a bleak experience in general, but I was also bothered by the repetitive nature of some of my tasks, like setting up new users and email accounts, and doing weekly checks on our remote servers. One day I asked if we could automate some of it and the response was a shocked and disapproving "you want to run scripts? on our production servers?!".
I took a couple of months off between my first and second IT support jobs and learned basic programming through the website "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python". I mostly wrote little scripts and my "biggest" project at the time was a Flappy Bird clone built using Kivy which I probably left unfinished.
However at my second IT job, I wrote my first program as a means to an end. During a quiet 2 week period at work, 3 of us were supposed to go through a list of a few hundred ex-customers and remove them from our ticketing system. Probably dreading the idea of spending such a significant time on that, I said I could automate it. And I did - not particularly well, but I got the job done. That's when I thought "maybe I can get paid to do this instead".
That was 10 years ago and since then I've been involved in automating processes, building and contributing to a number of websites and apps both greenfield and legacy alike. But strictly outside of work and work-adjacent purposes, I've never finished a project.
That may be a shock to some, and not to others. My partner is confused by it, given I spend at least a few hours each weekend programming. He'll ask "how's your game going?" and I'll respond "I haven't really been working on it", while he peers over my shoulder at code, trying to figure out what I'm actually working on, if not the game.
All along I thought I enjoyed being a software developer because it allowed me to solve my, and other peoples problems. But as it turns out, I actually enjoy being a software developer because I love programming.
I enjoy solving technical problems, and figuring out what strategies I can employ to make my solutions better. I like taking the time to understand how things work under the hood. For example, I wanted to experiment with different testing strategies for my game which has led me to spend months developing my own Property Based Testing library. I've been reading lots of documentation, books and even research papers about the subject. And I'm not doing it for the sake of completion, or open sourcing it (although if I get that far, I might). I'm just doing it because I want to understand the design choices and considerations that go into building such a thing.
If I cared about finishing my game, I wouldn't have created 5 different incomplete versions of it over the last 4 years. I don't care about finishing the game, I don't want to finish it - I'm using it as a vehicle to learn about the software engineering topics I'm interested in. I'm scratching the itch and getting better at my craft while doing so.
I am a bit fearful that AI is coming for the part of my job that I actually love, and that once it's gone I'll just be left with the bits I simply tolerate. Maybe it won't, or maybe I'll be able to cope in some way that still allows me to do the fun bits from time to time. Who knows what will happen. However it goes, I'm glad that I got paid to do something I enjoy for a pretty long time.
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