I’ve been catching up on my mail and blogs today. I tend to get to them in spurts, but because life is as it is, the gaps in between, even when it’s only a few days, means that there are dozens if not hundreds of things to read. I’ve caught up on seemant, tsunam, and grant’s blogs about the current state of things, and i’m not going to retread anything too much, but I have to ask (the dev community at large), why do you do it?
You see, lately, just in time for annual ides of march madness, there are flamewars and discontent, and to some it seems like more than normal (not really, but we pace ourselves pretty well). I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but as has been pointed out, its not a new thing either. So why do devs still power up their boxes and work on things if opening their mail client is going to be such a flood?
No clue. I just know why I do it. It’s for that feeling I get, way down deep (image of Chris Farley and his bear claws skit would be appropriate right here). I don’t do it as often as I should, but I’ll find myself pulling up a bug, or someone will alert me to one that needs attention, and I’ll begin working on it. Maybe it takes 3 minutes to shoot off a reply, or 4 hours to come up with a fix. When it’s on the shorter end of the timescale, I’ll start looking around, finding other things that I can easily take care of quickly, and before you know it I’ve closed or commented on a dozen or two bugs and updated dev-perl. At that exact second that I finally pull my cramped, aching fingers away from the keyboard, a sense of euphoria descends upon me.
Maybe it’s just me, but it’s like a drug when I get into that zone and hours and problems melt before me. When I pull my head up to realize that I haven’t done a damned thing that I set out to do today, but that what I have accomplished has helped someone else, or at least helped my sanity out.
So that’s why I do it. That’s why at least a few times a week the cvs logs spit out my name in the commit logs. It has nothing to do with who’s being an ass (or not) on -dev. Or who wants what from what and how. It’s because I get a satisfaction out of it. Sure, I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, I’d like to see Gentoo be a bit more on the innovative side, a bit more on the “hey, did you hear what Gentoo just did?!?” But I have no idea what that would be, just that feeling.
OK, I’ll shut up now. All three readers have probably stopped reading and its just me and the aggregators at this point.
more than three !