It was fun, it is fun and it shall be fun

Actually by it I meant "IT" :)

I was recently back to professional programming (read: code for food) and the experience was memorable.

I joined this team partly because they are in Hanoi (the place I don't really want to live but love to explore). The first few days, the technical lead told me 'bout Git and I was like

why don't we just go with SVN bro ? I used to ...

And you know what, now I use Git even for my hobby project where I'm the sole person working on it.

"I used to..." is a very dangerous thing and I'm glad that I'm still open to new stuffs after all those years. That helps a lot in IT and that's also why I love IT the same way I love travelling, there are always interesting things to be discovered.

Some people mix up interesting-and-practical-things with shiny-but-not-practical things. The latter is how I classify many debates 'bout which framework is the best or which programming language will probably conquer the world.

It's always fun to use what at hand and still get things done. For example, we had this project where I consolidated data using SQL Server then used Excel 2010 to generate a centralized reporting system. People who laugh at PHP will probably laugh at Excel as well. And I even wrote some interface with VB to help with the data maintenance.

It just works. It solves issues. People see more data and insights out of it. They like it very much and don't really bother to care what it made of. And to me, it's fun.

Back to the tech-lead-cum-my-first-Git-master, he seems like an introvert and I learn from him a lot. Then come my boss in that startup, he was at the other side of the spectrum (extrovert) but I learn a lot from him as well. It's fun to work with people that you truly connect with. In IT, you can't bluff that much (you can in many other professions), either you do, or you don't.

I told my boss that in my previous gig which involves dealing with businessmen from the North of VN, it was more talk than action. Something like "you know what, we will finalize a big deal with government soonnnn"... then my turn "erh.. how 'bout the quota you missed this quarter bro ?" (of course, I didn't literally say that). And so, it was a refreshing experience working with him this time. He talks and in the meanwhile walks it.

The other thing looks fun to me, is that in IT, we can create what we think 'bout. Coming from a background of several years working in MNC (where a change might take months to be realized), very little lead time between think, then do and see the result is definitely fun.

There are lots more to say but I guess my point in this is just, well... let's keep IT fun :)