Goodbye, cruel code!

Wednesday the 26th was an odd day at work. Things were busy as I tried to finish up some loose ends before heading out on vacation. I had been going through a bunch of my old papers, magazines, and other miscellaneous things as I packed up my office for a pending move. There were also meetings to attend and other people to talk to during the day, but that part was normal.

The weird part was knowing that I might not ever write code again.

I have been working on Soundtrack (and related projects) for the past five years. Looking back it feels like both an extremely long and short amount of time. It has been a lot of fun and a great set of challenges for me. We had three major releases and countless other small ones. We were in 'super-secret' mode twice (once for each 1.0), which is rather unusual. I have worked with a lot of great people from our team and others. I learned A LOT - coming from a QA position and picking up SCM, debugging, building, and countless other skills.

But for me, this all goes back even further.

I went to school for a software engineering degree at Iowa State. I loved the Mac, and I wanted to work on it - somehow. The engineering part of my degree (rather than being in computer science) was how I tried to follow after my dad, and meant that I had to take more electrical engineering courses. I quickly realized that EE was not my forte (with transcripts to prove it :), but I stubbornly stayed with the engineering part of my degree.

There was no HCI program at ISU back then, and if I had known those programs existed I would have done things differently. For the courses and positions I was in, I did my best to design things well and present great user interfaces.

In Soundtrack and other places at work I have tried to do as much with UI as possible, but at the end of the day I was responsible for the code, and that was what got priority. My heart was still hoping to spend more time dealing with the designs and the UI interactions.

Then this summer I heard about the opportunity to work with UI all the time. I jumped at the chance and worked as hard as I could, trying to get the position that I have always wanted. And I'm very happy to say, things worked out well :)

So when I go to work today, I will be beginning my new job as an HI designer. I will be working with a great bunch of people, and learning as much as I can from them. It should be a fun and challenging time, and am really excited to get started.

Now, it is possible that I will still write some code. Coding has worked its way into my heart as well, and it would be difficult to give up entirely. It is very likely that I will not ever write code as a part of my job, it may end up being something for me to do in my free time. Check back in a few months or years and I will let you know :)