sent2null space

A few weeks ago I was having an IM chat with an old friend and as is usually the case, I started talking about some aspect of my work and off hand mentioned the fact that to me , fun is working on a hard problem. It can also be incredibly frustrating when a problem evades solution but that only makes me want to solve it more. I realized that this way of looking at problems is very rare, this was something I noticed not in software engineering but in art. When I was a child I had a bit more talent than my peers when it came to line rendering, it was something I enjoyed and practiced by reading comic books and then drawing the characters in them by eye. As I got into my teens and entered HS I became more interested in under standing the mechanics of drawing. As I've mentioned in past posts , skill at any thing can be learned, it is only a matter of figuring out the necessary object interactions and mastering them to the point that we can visualize and create arbitrary configurations ...

The last two nights were spent completely focused on finalizing the implementation and testing of the guest private messages feature to the framework. I am happy to report it is complete and working exactly as I envisioned it should 10 days ago. Through the process I was thinking of the roller coaster ride of emotions that we go through when we are faced with a difficult challenge. Despite the fact that we might have previous experience addressing and vanquishing similar challenges when they are new the feeling we have inside to eliminate them fills our effort with focus. I was so focused at one point that the ring of the phone startled me to jump out of my seat, I didn't finish the final bug removal and testing of all options until 6 am. I had the same rage to master problems I've encountered when I was learning to illustrate human anatomy as well as in my current running hobby. In software, I just have difficulty getting to bed when I have a problem "alive", especi...