From an early age I became interested in computing, the wonder of building stuff, getting things to work and showing off to your friends.

It was very much a dark art back then, you subscribed to the latest tech journals, got amazed by hardware specs (jeezus!! 10mb of RAM!!) and tried to beat everyone at DOOM; times were great.

Things have moved on a bit since then but there’s still that wonder for creating the impossible, the thing no-one’s tried to do that drives you. You stay up late at night coding away just to see what would happen if X = Y and R loops thru P once too often; the challenge of getting your code bullet-proof, unbreakable; solid gold! then releasing it into the wild to prove your that good.

Nowadays it’s practically addictive, SubVersion helps a lot, everytime you check in a new release you shout YES as you can see yourself moving closer to those goalposts; getting to the next level, defeating the big boss and finding out what’s on the end of the rainbow.

Programming should be fun no matter what you’re building, that’s why we do it and that’s why we love it and the open-source movement has helped a lot to make this our reality.

Sure, the .COM boom was a bad day in history, but it needed to happen just to clear the way for the second wave of web evolution. Creating companies like 37Signals who in turn pushed out Ruby on Rails so that we could be more productive, coders love new toys and this is one of the biggest toy-boxes ever!

Today there are so many like-minded individuals, friends, colleagues, trying to push the envelope. It’s evolution on an atomic scale and if you can get paid to do what you love things can be pretty sweet!

So shout down to those bullies in the school-yard who smirk at your little science groups and geek dinners…

Being a coder ROCKS!