I always wanted to be a programmer. As programmer my main motivations are three main items: challenging problems, good inputs — computers, printers, and related stuff — and well done stuff. Not necessary in that order. Including more than money. Challenging problems are those problems that can make you think a lot on how to solve them, where you need to take your books about algorithms and make some research on how to solve them, mainly related to algorithm design. Good inputs allow you to make a better work, more efficient working hours and comfortable job. Well done stuff, is all your job made well, with the proper milestones, without pressure and doing a great work with algorithms implemented with beautiful code.
All this stuff does not come always in the same job at once. You must choose between them, but ideally you are seeking them. Is very nice to work with these conditions, because your job is being very well considered once you start doing it with this set. Also the environment and the working teams are very considerable, but I am not talking about the human factors. Also having coffee, tea, juice for free is very good too, because you can increase your efficiency with that kind of drinks. I really prefer to do very well done stuff, rather than doing monkey patched code. Thinking very well on each piece of the algorithm to implement, with a good design and good coding style — I prefer the Python coding style, based on the Zen of Python.
Finally I think that the team where do you work is very important. For example on my current team we are doing code reviews. Each peer on the team is reviewing the code of another peer, just to ensure code quality, share knowledge and increase the learning curve of the whole team. Is very nice to work with a team like this. We are using a DVCS tool with a code review tool called FishEye, so we can comment each code commit. Mainly it acts like a Wiky for our code.
Well, that is what I like of a working environment. Not so much detail, but I prefer to work on that kind of environment, but you can imagine the kind of office that I like.
Entries 