Code. It consumes a lifetime.

Since I switched to contract/freelance work I have spent a lot more time coding then I have in the past. Aside from wanting to polish up my personal projects and picking up more freelance jobs I really think It’s because I’m getting a lot better at it. When I first started to learn how to write software I spent a heck of a lot of time staring at lines of code and as I got better at actually writing it I ended up producing tons more. Now that I’ve been writing PHP apps for 10 years I have to say that I finally feel extremely efficient at it. After spending a little time working out the logic of an application I can now code as if I were writing a book. It’s a really good feeling that is only making me enjoy coding applications more. With that said I’ve taken it on myself to re-write the largest piece of software I’ve created to date and I’m loving it. It’s an all encompassing insurance sales and support system. It combines so many technologies and so much business logic that it never gets boring. It’s also entertaining to look at huge chunks of old code and laugh a bit before easily refactoring it to be much more efficient with significantly less code, or even better is to do that to large chunks of logic spanning across multiple classes. It continues to amaze me that even though I’ve been writing efficient, functional, well documented object orientated PHP for quite some time I can still go back to something I coded even just a year or two ago and ‘make it better’. I’ve always been able to look back and see that I’ve been getting better at coding but I don’t feel that it’s ever ‘clicked’ as well as it does now. I couldn’t tell you what threshold I had to cross to get here but I sure can say that I love what I do more then I ever have and I’m damn good at it!

Now if I could just make one of those silly simple $1 apps that sells a million subscriptions so I could just keep coding as I am forever without having to concern myself with actually getting paid for it. I will be coding for the rest of my life regardless of whether it’s what I do to pay the bills.