For those whose programming job is their "Dream Job"

Question

What exactly do you do, and what do you love about your work?

P.S. Im looking for technical stuff like an interesting domain, challenging problems and not non-technical factors like being self-employed, work-life balance, flexible hours etc.

Answer 1

Using technologies I love (Python first and foremost -- Linux, Mac, TCP/IP, C++, Javascript, SQL, HTML/CSS, etc, etc, also help), with excellent process (weekly sprints, mandatory code reviews, fanatical emphasis on testing, extremely agile approaches, ...) and tools and abundant resources to support all of this, are the key technical issues -- but non-technical ones (working for a company I really care for, and the incredible excellence and integrity of everybody I interact with, above all) are in fact at least as important, whether you want to hear about them or not;-).

Answer 2

It's all what you make of it. The exact technology doesn't matter, that changes every couple years anyway.

When I was young, I built structures with blocks. As I got older I graduated to legos. Somehow, building software is an extension of that. I love to build things, to solve problems, and be creative in the process. Programming lets me wave my hands over the computer and make it do what I want it to do.

I work for a small company, so there are no specialists. When something needs to get done...well...someone better figure out how to get it down. So there is always something new to do. I mostly write code in Java, but also manage to squeeze in some Python, Perl and shell scripting here and there. Sometimes I need to do something low level and C or C++ works best. Between that and helping to administer our servers, there is always something new to do/learn. So it isn't about a specific technology for me, it is about being able to do new and different things every day, despite the fact that we are still selling the same product as yesterday (improving it every day of course). And I work with smart and interesting people.

Technically, we write software for mobile devices (PDAs, BlackBerrys mostly) and associated server software to make it communicate with all kinds of other systems. Strictly speaking, everything we do is Java. But really I don't think that matters. I could be writing medical, insurance or spaceship software, and as long as it was challenging and there was constantly an opportunity to learn new things, I'd be just as happy.