I started programming because I needed to solve a problem.
My former employer was a small college on the south-east side of Indianapolis and they kept all their student’s academic records in Excel files. I was a humanities teacher with a degree in music theory, but I didn’t like that broken system. So I build an Access application that held all the records safely and accessibly. Along the way I discovered two things: I love solving problems by writing software, and Access has some serious limitations when you try to do cool things with it.
So I re-wrote the entire thing again using ASP.NET MVC 4. And it was fun.
When people I care about who are advancing a cause I care about have a problem I care about, and I fix the problem, that’s awesome. But when I start adding all sort of crazy new stuff that makes the tool go far beyond what they initially thought possible: satisfaction galore.
Now I’m at SEP. I’ve only been working for the company for just over a week and Matt, Jackson, and I are already deep into a complete rewrite of an internal system that several coworkers use frequently to do their job. It is going to be faster, prettier, more accurate, more maintainable, and more awesome. And it will work. (The previous system died.) I can’t wait to get this thing done so that it can help some (new) friends have a better day, every day. And, did I mention, just about every piece of this system we are building with tools and technologies and languages I have never used before. “Yay” for learning!
That is why I’m a programmer; I want to solve problems for people. And that’s why I’m working at SEP, because I want to be amazing at it. I have a passion to learn and excel. Not only am I passionately driven to develop software solutions to solve problems, I’m passionately driven to develop my own skills and to become the best. Here’s to constant improvement. Here’s to mastery.
