The Developer's Code

Essay 20

Improve Your Product in Two Ways Daily

Let’s not sugarcoat programming. At times, development can get dull. There are moments when I’d like to do anything else, like perform open-heart surgery on an endangered animal.

In the proverbial dog days of development, sustainable productivity has to come from really small victories. The simple satisfaction of coding or those delusions of fame won’t keep us productive all the time. There has to be a daily nugget of inspiration—a baseline motivator that exists even when the more general motivators grow stale.

For the first year of our company, I spent a large amount of time building a web-based data modeling application called X2O. To this day, X2O creates the application framework for every ...