I've got a new manager at work, Monty Ghitter. I liked my old manager, Phil Brien, but the company wanted something different than what he offered. I'll miss Phil. I consider him a good friend.

So anyway, Monty asked me basically what turns my crank, or what makes me want to go to work in the morning? Along with that, what do I like and what don't I like.

The easy thing is what I don't like. I don't like Microsoft. As a developer, I feel left out. They offer the typical trial tools, but if you want to do any serious development on the Windows platform, the bread-and-butter developer is left with nothing but html and javascript.

I've worked on a VAX BASIC application called CBS for about 10 years. It's essentially a tool for the business to manage customer cable, internet, and phone accounts. It does work order management, provisioning of equipment, billing, and invoicing. I spent most of my time on the billing and invoicing. I wrote the part that does invoice notifications by e-mail, did a rebuild of the invoicing component to work with DOC1 (a tool that formats invoices), and wrote a customer messaging component that makes it easy to include inserts and messages with the invoice. The latter component is heavily relied on for rate adjustment notifications and was a big win for the company for productivity gains.

Of the CBS projects that excited me the most were the email and messaging components. I liked those because they made a difference. The messaging project came about as need to implement a previously failed rate adjustment in an emergency time frame. I had spent a long time doing incremental changes for bill inserts and was struggling to come up with a method to let the business make the changes themselves, without programming them. When this project came up, the method that I needed to use came clearly to me and solved both problems.

I also like refactoring, either for performance or for reusability. Coming up with a better way of doing something excites me.

I think I still like working with VAX BASIC, because it's become familiar to me. For my own career growth, I need to consider working with tools that are being used in current technologies. So for that reason, I need to dislike VAX BASIC.

There are tools that I like, but don't get to use often enough. I like Java, Javascript, PHP, CSS, XML, XSL, jQuery, and AJAX. I like hammers too.

So it comes down to what I'd like to do with those tools.

I like things that make me think. Once something gets to be thoughtless, it becomes mundane quickly and it's difficult to want to do it (unless I see the value in it - eating is thoughtless, but has lots of value!).

I like things that are cool. AJAX is cool. But it's also cool because it makes sense, like Unobtrusive Javascript makes sense because it promotes separating the display of information from the functionality behind it.
jQuery is cool because it has simple syntax and adds some cool functionality to web pages.

What I really like about these tools is that they're accessible so that I can learn and use them outside of work.

It doesn't make sense to get excited about tools unless you have something to make with them. What do I want to build then? I like making interfaces that people like to use. I'm happy to do the heavy lifting, but sometimes get frustrated with the finishing. I like some of the financial applications, as long as I have good requirements to work from. I like working with data too: figuring out the best way to represent something or to extract and massage the data into something that can be understood. I like to take something plain and dry and turn it into something fresh and vibrant. A simple tabular report is plain and dry. I like to show meaning with substance and let them visually feel the data. I like it when I make something that someone can look at in a different way and suddenly get it.

I like to take photographs. It's the same feeling as when someone looks at my pictures and says "Wow, that's beautiful!"

That's what gets me up in the morning.