sonia | Pride and programs

jesse_the_k asked "What was the first program you can remember being proud of writing?"

This is a surprisingly complex question to answer. In college, I was writing whole programs for homework, and I remember being pleased when a guy who was helping me debug a program said it was very clear and easy to understand. I wasn't centered enough to feel pride on my own account.

For my Compilers class project, I wrote (most of) a C compiler in Prolog. This is a daft thing to attempt, far too large a problem for a class project. I don't recall the teacher trying to talk me out of it - Hopkins was a "drink from a firehose" kind of place back then. I think they give a little more care to their undergraduates now, but back then we were left to our own devices to figure things out.

Once I started working, I didn't write whole programs by myself. When I started out, I worked by myself, on pieces of bigger existing systems. There was a proud and very happy moment when I ran a program on the computer, and the scanner across the room *did something*! I was in the Devices group and wrote an interface to tell the scanner to scan and then read in the image it produced. I would say I'm proud of that.

These days, my preference is to pair with other people. It's more fun, and it produces better software. I'm proud of the module my coworker and I created over the last month or two to manage the series of steps a user goes through to verify their identity. It started out complex, and got clearer and easier to use as we worked on it. Oh hey, it's open source so I can link to the code and the documentation I just wrote.

Thanks for the chance to think about this. In summary, I don't remember the first program I was proud of writing, because I wasn't very good at being proud of things back then, and I stopped writing whole programs by myself when I got out of school, and here, have the latest part of a program I'm proud of writing jointly with someone else! I hope that's at least partly satisfactory as an answer.