Tom Dalton :: Doer of Good

I have to program often. Not as often as a Programmer, of course. But far more often than the typical Marketer.

A little PHP scripting, to insert tracking code in a shopping cart -- that's understandable. Revising a database-driven website in ASP.NET so we can edit meta tags on a page-by-page basis -- marginal, but still within reason.

But writing from scratch a tool to simulate thousands of browser sessions, executing millions of queryies across various public data sources to compile and analyze data that becomes the core of a strategic marketing campaign?

Writing another tool to extract hundreds of thousands of keywords, campaigns, and bid data from a secure website and format it for import into another site's structure?

Rewriting a core class to manage the socket connection directly?

That's Programming. And I hate it.

The typos and data types. The barely documented 'unexpected behaviors' of core libraries. The ludicrous abstraction of classes. The plain old stupidity of the machine -- if it doesn't work, TRY IT AGAIN! Don't just give me an error message and quit! Honestly, I'd fire an employee half as dumb as my computer.

But I love when it works. When I can finally click "go," and watch the computer go do something that would have taken three weeks even with the combined effort of everyone in the company. When I can release a program that not only saves us time but becomes a central piece of our entire offering.

Programming stinks, but getting a computer to do mountains of work for you -- that is almost intoxicating.

So I keep doing it. Hating it just keeps me sane.

(And I still have no answer to the question I posed myself a while back: If I had the choice, would I rather be a VP of Marketing or a Chief Technology Officer? That's poorly phrased, but you get the idea, right? I straddle the two worlds, and it's invigorating. I hope I don't ever have to choose.)