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Comment by HeyLaughingBoy | Hacker News Reader

> Some days I feel like I've never have built something as useful again since then

Oh I am so familiar with this feeling. I recently found a program I wrote at my last job on a flash drive. It came from a chance conversation with one of the scientists I worked with.

After listening to her lament the many hours of manually parsing log files it took for her team to generate reports, I wrote a short program one day (with a few updates over the following weeks) to do it for them. Some days I feel that the code I wrote that one slow afternoon was the most useful thing I've done in terms of ROI. A couple hours of fun text manipulation and voila: a bunch of Very Happy People (tm) and untold hundreds of hours of time saved.

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I feel like back then I could appreciate the usefulness of my work a lot more. Even a very simple program was like magic and I got my feeling of accomplishment. Nowadays it's all about best practices, getting stars on Github or writing influential blog posts to further my career. By surrounding myself with other successful people, the bar has become a lot higher than in my childhood days where most peers could barely even turn on a computer. I have realized that writing a software to do X is most of the time trivial; getting tests to pass is only the very first step. But writing software in a _good way_ (whatever that means) is the hard part and the worst thing is that there is no clear indicator if you are even improving. It used to be the program either works or it doesn't. But values like maintainability and scalability are intangible and a perfectionist like me is compelled to work themselves to death in pursuit of an unclear goal. In many cases I don't even care if the program works as long as the code is beautiful, like a mathematician who spends all his time working out elegant proofs with zero applicability whatsoever. It doesn't help that I have to waste my talent on pointless CRUD and yet another e-commerce system, which only serves to sell people things they don't need and make the rich even richer.

I did something similar! It shoved lab results into a SQLite DB and ran some simple queries for them. Before it was all being hand imported into excel. I thought it was neat throw away work but turned out the entire lab team migrated over to it.

Something about people actively choosing to use your work with no pressure, marketing or mandate just hits different emotionally.

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