Ubiquitous Programming Problems
I am very much a supporter of the open-source movement. An essay on the moral obligation to open-source your software has been rattling around in my head for the past few weeks, and while I was mulling this over in the shower this morning, I realized something: most of my programmer colleagues don’t open-source their work because they don’t have any work to open-source.
This might sound strange - a programmer doesn’t have any programs? But many people only ever write code for their employer, which takes licensing out of their hands. The question, then, is: why don’t they write anything outside of work?
Whether it’s good for a programmer to write code outside of work is a heavily-debated subject, focusing on building programming chops vs. becoming a well-rounded individual. I’m not concerned with intentional choices though - rather than asking “Why don’t you program in your spare time? It’s good for you!” I’m asking “How can you not program in your spare time?”.
When I first got introduced to programming, my enthusiasm quickly died off. I made a program that spits out the numbers one to ten - great, and so what? But web development, oh, was that different! With some basic HTML lessons I could make my own web pages - something only gods could do! Suddenly my universe expanded, providing options I never considered possible previously. Much of my joy of programming comes from a continuation of this feeling - there are now so many problems in my life that I have the power to fix. Even if I choose not to, it makes me cope better with buggy or unfriendly software I use - if I complain about it, I’ll have to fix it or make a replacement, so sometimes I choose to just tone down the grumbles. :)
Many of these problems are very small, which makes them great for an hour’s hacking. For instance, I use development builds of my music player and was having troubles with it sometimes not reporting the music I played to the statistics-gathering website Last.fm. I could keep refreshing my profile page to see if tracks were added, but that required a browser window, flash running, waiting for the page to reload, and just seemed too heavy a solution. So, I spent a little time pulling tracks out of the RSS feed Last.fm helpfully provides and made lastfm-tail. It’s quite simple, but solves the problem exactly (I use it nearly every day), and since I had no reason not to, I made it publically available, both as source on Github and easily installable as a Ruby gem.
My life is filled with problems like this, and I can’t help but see the programming solutions to them. Why doesn’t everyone?
I’m also interested in the general consideration of this trait: is it good, bad, or insignificant when evaluating a programmer? There are companies that publically state they favor candidates with open-source involvement - is this one of the reasons?
