Maybe I'm a Artsy Fartsy dude

So...I've been wondering a while what makes me tick as a programmer.  I like lots of technologies but I can never get too interested in one for long enough to get very deep.  I used to be driven by work requirements to learn new technologies and it thrilled me.  But nowadays, most work driven technologies bore me.

So I had a heated argument with an old office mate over beer today.  Typical....he loves JavaScript and I prefer Flash.  I've used Flex for UI development and I liked it.  But even THAT has bored me to the point where stepping away from Flex almost 9 months ago was a pleasant idea.  I had become the Flex/UI guy and rarely got to write much server code.  That was okay because most server code has been Java in my career up until recently.  Java bores me.  But now I get to do Groovy.  Which is nicer but it has started to bore me now as well.

Okay, I digress but isn't that the point of a blog.  Digression without consequences.  Anywho, my argument about Flash vs. JavaScript got me longing to piddle with Flex again, so after a few hours trudging through some Android code to call our REST interface, I blew the dust off my old ActionScript 3.0 Animation book.  Fortunately for me my Flex 3 book was at the office so I incidentally starting drawing a red circle as a Flash sprite.

I started getting interested again...I grabbed a Flash Games book and started flipping through it.  Then I dug up an old Computer Graphics for Java Programmers and began to surmise how I might modernize this by writing Groovy versions of the samples.  Even began plotting how Groovy might get slow and Scala might be better when I start wanting to do some concurrency with multiple objects moving about the screen.  Then I started looking for resources on Android graphics, Objective C animation and revisiting my whim of learning OpenGL...

So maybe it's not that I need to find a particular language, or framework to interest me.  Maybe I just need to do more graphics.  Less text boxes and XML parsing and more sprite animations, 3d texturing and transformations.  A simple 3d gray box spinning around on the Android simulator gave me more thrills than the thought of implementing a REST client for work with my long lost friend, Flex.

Maybe it's not Flex or Flash.  Maybe I REALLY like shiny, flashy, eye candy thingies when coding.

Or this is all moot...I could be bored with this all in the morning...