I had to chuckle when I was thinking about ridiculous stuff I did when I was a kid. Like, my mom never understood why I would take ALL day on the computer patiently waiting while I colored each countries. The computer was so slow, the fill function would take 5-10 minutes each country I wanted to color. Then sometimes there were hole in the border, leading it to fill in well more than I wanted, and I had to fix the hole. Everyone else doing this homework probably would have been using a nice old crayon, but no, I had to do it with the computer, even if it took forever.
Or, how about that one where I blew soda bottle top on the kitchen table for about 2-3 hours. I was having fun looking at how as I blew the soda bottle top, it rolled in different directions based on how I blew it. I steered it as I blew it. My mom told me “I couldn’t watch it! It was so boring.”
How about the time when I filled out fairground applications with a typewriter! It took forever — talk about lining up every line so when I typed, it would hit the right line. This was before we had the nice computers we have today, and needless to say my mom was rolling her eyes thinking “you could get this done much faster with a pen!”
How about for 4-H, I opted to use the computer scanning software to load it into my computer, then manually enter the data into it, then print that out.
Fast forward to today. Have I grown out of it. Nope! I still, at times, spend lot of time working on a solution to do something somewhat simple in a MUCH faster way over the long run. And guess what, sometimes it is a positive trait. You see, I’m an incredibly patient person (ask anybody who has danced with me as a beginner or who learn sign language from me). If something isn’t working, you can probably count on me to bang at it persistently until an acceptable solution is found. You see, this is my life as a computer programmer — I’m paid to solve problems. Yeah, sometimes even problems that gets other people stumped.
I can tell you that co-workers have benefited from this trait. Take for instance, one test environment server that we all had installed on our machine that lost all of its configuration state every time you reboot the server. Of course, you don’t want your laptop running 24/7…and you need to reboot sometimes. Some other guy developed a few scripts to set up the configuration once the server has boot up. Ok…I looked at how it was done — then I developed a script to make that script. And then I developed a script that would run several of those scripts upon server startup, so you could have everything configured within a minute after the server boot up. I don’t know if anybody else would have bothered, and when I demonstrated this system at a team meeting, everyone was wowed. That was maybe 3 years ago. I can’t imagine how much time I would have wasted over the years if I hadn’t developed those scripts!
Now our system has been upgraded. Once again, I’m at it…making a better configuration for everybody, and making it easier for everybody else to get their machine up to speed.
Sometimes, I kind of think I might have the wrong job, honestly. Because on my job, oftentimes the things I love spending a lot of time doing sometimes isn’t necessarily in my job description. I was just talking to another co-worker, and he remarked “no offense, but you have sysadmin traits”. Oh yeah, I know that, thanks for confirming it to me! Now, I also like doing development work. I’m a developer, and a researcher at heart. YES — I don’t think you can be a good developer without some good research, or at least self-education skills.
