The Holy Grail and the Programmer’s High
Monday, 26 October 2009
Dave Winer, the inventor of RSS, wrote today about twitter’s latest API update for supporting the lists feature
It turns out there’s an API call that retrieves the timeline for a list, and it works exactly like the API call that retrieves the timeline for an account. So much so that I didn’t even have to change the glue script, I pass in a different URL and it just worked > orig link
I wonder if there can be a better award?! Dave Winer applauding twitter?! I never thought I’d see the day 
(Just kidding Dave). Dave’s right though. There is a certain high that you get when something just works (as it was intended). That is the high that we programmers live for. It’s like a runner’s high.
It doesn’t happen very often though. When you work on large enterprise applications where several hundred bugs invariably creep in. Decades of dragging along old code and scars from several re-designs is a norm. But, once every so often, you change a complex module, with nothing but your own understanding of how the code works (it most cases, the understanding itself is small miracle), and the change that you make, works in several of the cases at once — that moment is pure happiness. It completely makes up for all the months of slogging, and the bug-hunting
You cannot be a programmer, if you don’t live for that!
