Sunday, October 3, 2010

Finding the Fun

I was days away from uploading Geomancy to the app store, when I discovered that I had been using instruments incorrectly. Contrary to my much twittered belief that Geomancy was memory leak free, I discovered that my fledging app was full of them. I immediately set about at tracking them down and fixing them, and spent a few days learning about memory management in Objective C and I was able to clean up all the issues. Normally the prospect of tracking down memory leaks would have filled me with dread, but this time I looked forward to it. I wanted to make the app good (half for fear of apple rejecting my first submission and half because I was scared of there being some issue that apple wouldn't find but the reviewing public would). It was the first time I can remember thinking that tracking down memory leaks was fun.

The idea seems to be (and it seems obvious) that you get a lot more out of learning something if you enjoy the process of doing it.

A few days ago I was walking around a small bookshop and ended up in the section with all the self-help books (the shop had called this section: Self Enrichment). There were loads of titles about trying to enjoy your job. What's important to me is not really my job, it's programming, I love programming and I love all the meta stuff around programming like talking about code and thinking about code. We all have days when we wonder what we're doing, but I'm having one of those days where I'm just happy to be where I am doing what I do, so I'm going to enjoy it.

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