What type of development do you find most interesting?

Question

My past experience has primarily been in the new media industry. My experiences were that while this industry seemed to be laid back, most places have next to no management protocols. This inevitably leads to disorganized chaos,a lot of firefighting and lots of late nights.

I also find new media work to be mostly the same type of developments i.e. web based ECommerce/CMS/Marketing sites. Though I will admit that I have had some interesting projects in my time, though they were few and far between.

My current position is more line of business, internal application developments. In this type of industry I find I am dealing with more than enough protocols and procedures (red tape ahoy!). The disadvantages here are that I'm working on large old projects that were written years ago, so it is not bleeding edge. I'm also finding that of line-of-business application development seems to be split something along the lines of:

• 60% Mapping UI screens to CRUD operations.
• 15% Maintaining legacy systems
• 15% Business logic.

I wonder what your experiences are like, anyone working on:

• Framework developments,
• Or maybe E-learning portals
• Games/3D Applications
• Financial applications
• CRM systems

Tell me your experiences and what you guys/gals find the most interesting type of development to get into.

EDIT:

I suppose this is slightly off topic, but can I also ask what languages you primarily use in your interesting roles. Not for flame war time, but to simply gauge which language fit in which sectors.

Answer 1

The development I find most interesting is the one that can be reused by the next projects, so you can say frameworks are the things that get me excited. The reason is simple, it makes me more productive every project that goes by.

Answer 2

GIS (Geographic Information Systems) - lots of great client data, aerial photography (OK, not such a novelty these days...) and maps.

Answer 3

I like short development projects. Otherwise things drag on and I get bored and lose interest!

Answer 4

R&D definitely.

Being able to research new technologies is a big plus.

Answer 5

Kernels, compilers, reverse-engineering tools, emulators. All of them are far more fun than anything else I've found.

That said, kernel work is probably my favorite. I've never seen any field that had as much room for R&D as the kernel world.

Answer 6

I like reusable library development:

• It tends to be self-contained, rather than using load of extra libraries and services.
• It tends to be more easily testable than application development, due to the first point.
• I get a kick out of creating an elegant design, which is much more important in library coding than application coding.
• It can often be done on an ad-hoc basis: I've been gradually adding to MiscUtil for years.
• It's useful to other developers - I like the idea of devs as customers.

Answer 7

User Interface Development does it for me.

Answer 8

I like building anything as long as I can see my user's reaction. Prototyping and evolving GUIs certainly applies here. But I've also gotten the same satisfaction from developing batch code because it filled a real need, and the users played the driving role.

The greatest impediment to producing excellent software is insulating the development team from the users. Too many projects "quarantine" the development organization.

Answer 9

The code I enjoy writing the most is that used to circumvent restrictions.

G-Man

Answer 10

Computer games, Artificial Intelligence, and low-level programing (embedded systems, electronics, robotics)

All of these are awesome.

Computer games are great; you must have been playing a game before and thought "this is cool, but wouldn't it be wicked IF..." . I'm lead dev for a Ultima Online custom server, Angel Island. It's great writing game systems - except when you get killed by them in game :)

Artificial intelligence and robotics/electronics - nothing quite like seeing your code learn, and perform in the real world!

Answer 11

Building frameworks is fun.

Having to deal with the flaws in the framework I just built: not so fun.

Answer 12

Web Development.

• I can see my product form (no pun intended) and come to life
• Simultaneous immediate updates to all users
• Easy deployment
• I get to be part of the construction of what the world of software is evolving into.

Answer 13

Making tiny WPF programs works for me, and so does writing Visual Studio add-ins.

Answer 14

Big systems that last for decades - something like Windows, Office, Linux, Oracle...

Answer 15

Have you considered working on embedded systems?

• Got a link-up on your framer after spending one week tweaking registers here and there.
• Start receiving and transmitting packets on Ethernet driver or network processor.
• Having your boot-code be able to display a u-boot prompt.
• Having a Linux OS show the first console printk().
• Found a bug deep down in the kernel scheduler that takes weeks to reproduce.

The gratification from those are overwhelming :)

Answer 16

I've worked in a number of different environments as well and have to agree that most of the media focused outfits had a fair bit of late night fire fighting, but it always kept things interesting. Also I think that is partly just the penalty you pay for having a satisfying job where you have a lot of freedom. At some point that freedom needs to translate to code and the hectic time around a deadline is always challenging but is also stimulating.

• Frameworks (guess everyone loves this one)
• UI Design
• Graphics / Media (DirectX!!) - I really like to write rendering /UI frameworks!!

Answer 17

Device drivers and device communicators.