Stupid Is As Stupid Does

Today I got a reminder as to why I love programming.  It boils down to the computer doing exactly what you tell it to do.

I’ve used C to further develop an application for reading UHF RFID tags on a custom display and relaying that information to a web server running on an embedded device for processing.  I was troubleshooting a particular problem and, upon discovery of the PEBCAK** issue, I started laughing.  The application simply wasn’t doing anything at all other than displaying some debug output.

I had introduced an error in my code that kept the application from doing anything at all useful for as long as the application was running and it was all my fault.  The code that I’d written was doing exactly as I asked it to and it was me, the human in the equation, that had screwed up.

There’s two sides to that coin as the results of creating a working application that does real work for a client is a real badge of pride because it’s you, the programmer, that did the work and created the logic to get it working that way.

This is distinctly different from project management where you can only create the plan; you then need other humans to execute that plan.

If I have properly described my passion for programming, it’s probably readily apparent why project management doesn’t blow my skirt up but I’m spending time developing algorithms that might help in allowing logic to reign through out my project plans.  Maybe sometime I’ll be just has happy watching a project schedule unfold as I am while writing code for a compiler to chew on.

**Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard