CS Junkie, were is my fix.

One thing I have noticed in my time working in the IT industry is my lust for a challenge. I love the challenge of taking on a problem, figuring out the best way to solve it, and then deploying the solution. But it is the anti climatic nature of delivering the solution that makes think “well now what?”

Take my most recent snippet of work. The challenge – albeit a simple one – was to develop a script that read data from a database and wrote it to an excel file. Fairly standard fair. The challenge, for me, would be learning how to manipulate Perl to do this and then writing a working program. It took me a few days to get it down pat but after some research and a bit of mentoring from a more experienced Perl developer, I produced a nice little program. That is where the excitement ended. There was no feeling of accomplishment from producing a finished product.

I am quite happy to have saved several man hours of work a year by automating this little process and it was quite fun writing the script but now I am left with the feeling of “now what”. I feel like I need to feed an addiction of the next problem to solve. That is it! I am a computer science junkie! I need to find my next “score” and develop another tool.

Oh well, at least it pays well. It could be worse, I could have an actual addiction!