Days like this

My life as a programmer is mostly filled with tedious debugging, and fixing of ancient codes. Sometimes I go home with the feeling that I have worked in an abandoned warehouse all day. Digging out the old dirty codes and trying to make sense of them, moving things around and reorganizing them, then crossing my fingers and hoping it won't crash on me. At the end of the day, I have my arms and shoulders strained and myself covered in radiation dust. Then I go home, take a long warm bath and use a cotton cloth to wash off distress, boredom, and the blisters called routine.

Periodically, there comes days like these: I can create something that makes a different in the system, something that makes major performance improvement, something that's new and challenging. Something that, after spending days working on it, finally works. Around 11am this mooring, when I saw the new drawing show up correctly on the system and didn't make the system crash, my heart was instantly filled with joy. Enough joy that can keep me going for another several months or so without too much whinings and threatenings to quit.

days like this makes it harder to exchange reward for comfort .
days like this reminds me why I wanted to be a programmer in the first place.