Life is strange and complex.  Some days I find myself on top of life, feeling like its just this really massively huge game that’s easy to play and potentially beat.  Other times, I am constantly barraged with obstacles, misunderstandings, arguments and anything else that I have not anticipated or ’should have’ anticipated.  How can these stark feelings change so easily for me from day to day?

I swear, some days, I am just high on life.  This morning was awesome.  I woke up early, surprisingly refreshed from an unusually shortened night of sleep.  I felt good in the morning, remembered I bought real coffee creamer this past weekend and made myself a cup of fresh brew, which I have not done for quite a while.  I did my daily web site perusal, ala digg, huffingtonpost, nytimes and brief stops at techcrunch, arstechnica and gizmodo since I was feeling extra nerdy.  My list of past unread emails was also surprisingly light, a notch or two below the average dose of bad news that usually hits me in the morning.

I eventually started working, writing code for Fortune, which is yet to come out, reviewing some stuff from Collage, tinkering with Twinkle v1.2 and finally moving on to the dominatrix of my backend programming world, what everyone at Tapulous refers to as ‘refactoring’.  It’s been a long time coming, but it’s almost there, I promise.  Anyway, the progress was solid.  I was thinking about this the other day.  Programming, especially in the scope of the work that I am involved with, is such a strange and bizarre profession.  There are really few jobs like the job of a coder.  If you break down the average day of coding, its kind of weird to describe, but it goes something like this:

1. Make list (could be mental or physical) about what you want to accomplish by end of day
2. Break down each larger goal into smaller goals, smaller puzzles with fewer pieces
3. Start solving the smaller puzzles, each time, testing, verifying that things are going your way.
4. Connect the dots, piece together the smaller puzzles to make even larger puzzles
5. Test, verify and confirm that the smaller puzzles play nice with fellow smaller puzzles
6. Repeat process over each day, with new pieces, puzzles and potential problems

But in addition to this very broad generalization of solving problems by breaking them down, the puzzles themselves are such weird things to solve on a daily basis.  From a totally observational point of view, its just really abnormal to spend hours upon hours to solve issues like:

‘I need access to a specific field for a given application for a given user and I need to access it at a very highly scalable level, so it needs to be readily available, secure, and reliable. (And in making this field accessible, the changes cannot interfere or disrupt anything in the past.’

or ….

‘I need to solve an error that someone is reporting that does not happen at all when I or most of the users use a specific application but seems to happen to someone rarely and apparently randomly’

Besides just sounding really nerdy, who does this kind of stuff.  It’s like I live in this micro world of puzzles, and they never end and they always mutate into new breeds, some more interesting and some less.

But these are the interesting parts of my life.  As crazy as it sounds, these small tedius challenges actually excite me in some odd way.  What I find though lately is that my stability is highly erratic.  At the drop of a coin, I can go from the happy go lucky guy who just wrote two hours of hardcore PHP Memcache code to the grumpy guy who is now in pain because the internet just went down and it froze a file I was just saving and I got angry and repeatedly slammed my hand on my office desk until I was physically (and embarassingly) in pain.  How did I turn into that guy?