Saturday, 10 May 2003

A different kind of writing. I've been doing a little programming lately, just to keep my hand in; it's been years since I was a professional code monkey—I learned the power of the dark side and switched to management long ago—but I still write software as a hobby. Lately I've been re-writing the plumbing for my pet application, which is a program to help people with Macintoshes write old-fashioned text adventures like Zork or Colossal Cave. (I figure this is an audience of mmmaybe 20 people worldwide, though there is a thriving little community of text-adventure fans and authors out there, so perhaps I'm understating it a bit.)

For many people, "computer programming" and "hobby" go together like peanut butter and gasoline: It just isn't something they'd choose to do with their free time. It'd be like spending a nice, relaxing weekend cracking open the ledgers and doing some hardcore accounting. Of course many people enjoy stamp collecting or gardening or building model airplanes in their free time, all of which I find breathtakingly dull, so I suppose we all agree that other people's hobbies are much less interesting than our own. For me, programming is a creative outlet: I get to make things that other people find useful, which is fun and rewarding.

Unfortunately programming is a very time-consuming hobby: It's one where you have to get into "the zone" and stay there in order to be productive. In some ways it's like reading a book: You can read a lot faster if you're not being interrupted, and if you are interrupted it takes you a while to get back into it. Fog Creek Software CEO Joel Spolsky writes about this at length on his "Joel on Software" blog, more in the context of "how to succeed at running a software business," but nonetheless.

Anyhow, I've been blogging less lately because I've been programming more, which may be helpful to other REALbasic developers but isn't all that exciting for my loyal blog readers (both of you). Next week I'll write more exciting articles about Australian-American relations, how America is doing in the overseas propaganda fight, whether the war on Iraq made us safer from terrorists, and so on.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 7:47 am. comments.