Amen to that, brother

The most satisfying thing in programming for me is still making a physical LED blink. It never gets old for me.

It might sound a bit facetious but there's actually a lot of truth in that remark. It's about getting the computer to do cool things ^[1][2].

The recent upgrade of Awasu's feed updating engine is a case in point. There wasn't really much of a business case ^[3] to spend all that time and effort getting your feeds to update faster (most people don't have so many that it would make a huge amount of difference) but the way it was done was Seriously Cool (from a programmers' point of view) and I'm really pleased with it, not to mention how insanely quicker it is

And doing cool stuff like this certainly beats working at a bank or consultancy. A friend of mine has just taken a new consulting gig at a company where the main graphic on their home page is, I kid you not, a bunch of guys, decked out with corporate baseball caps, in a boat, all rowing together I have to ring him later today to find out just what the hell he was thinking

Anyway, can you tell I'm procrastinating? I'm sick as a dog so no woodshed for me today but since there's a bit of time pressure for the next release to be pushed out, I'm settling in for a marathon coding session. Sigh...

^[1] Your definition of "cool" may differ
^[2] And lest you think turning an LED on and off is trivial, you should know that das blinkenlights have an important place in the history of computer hardware.
^[3] This is not quite true. Awasu Server may be updating thousands of feeds so a faster, more efficient feed engine is very useful here. Awasu Server is still in an experimental stage but this is the business case I presented to rationalize justify this change