Grumpy Thursdays

I feel I'm not utilised effectively. My expertise is acknowledged, but seems to only help other people and their tasks. This isn't all bad, at least something's getting done.

Just once... ONCE... I want to do something amazing without having to be bottled up behind archaic, unfinished, uncommented, convoluted work that's so simple in principle, but unplanned and bordering on unsalvagable.

I had a discussion recently about the development complexities between applications and web applications. My view is that, in general, web applications are easier to build than non web, but harder to build well. I guess thats come about by the sloppy non standard "everyone and their dog can write it" language we call HTML.

I dislike working on stuff that consists of string concatenated messes of unreadable crap mixing client code, server code, layout and even application state etc into this "structured" heap that will never get rewritten, and will not evolve in a cost effective manner.

Programmers... what are they?

Some are stubborn and are beyond help.
Some are niche geniuses
Some are condescending and believe their work is beyond flaw, and its just the rest of the world who doesn't get it.
Some are inexperienced but eager to learn.
Some are lazy.
Some are stupid.
And the smallest minority can build good web pages.

I fit into all of these categories to some degree :). I'm sure their are other categories.

I'm good at what I'm good at. Simple, powerful, understandable, feature rich, accessible standards complaint blah blah blah. Oh.. and design (not the graphicy one)

I'm self taught. I used to think there was this mythical world of programming where you could write some fancy mathematical formulas over a few nights and have such amazing code that it could solve any problem you had. After a while, you realise how simple it is and why it doesn't need to be convoluted, and that all the errors occur when someones trying to be to clever for the sake of being clever.

Of course there are uber programmers out there (eg. Carmack) who are on some other elemental plane compared with the rest of us mortals. I'm not going to be involved in that ever :)

I don't know where I'm going with this :) I'm not a writer, but god damn I've had a shitty day.