I just finished reading a rather excellent interview that Jessica Livingston (of YCombinator fame) conducted with Joel Spolsky. The interview comes out of a book that recently went to press called Founders at Work.

Joel’s getting a little cheeky in his old age, but he still captivates when talking of technology, programming, and addressing issues near and dear to those with an entrepreneurial spirit. In this particular interview, a number of things stood out to me, but none as significant as this. Joel addresses a certain segment of software developers and says:

To them, it’s just kind of engineering step by step; it’s never the magic of creation.

That’s exactly what I don’t want for my ‘career’. To me, I want it to always be about the magic of creation. What code can we weave? What problems can be solved? What great hack can we write that reduces 2000 lines of code to 2 lines of code. Solve problems. Code for the end users. Code for the customers. Code with passion.