Thanks to those who make it fun..
It is mind boggling how much of what I take for granted in my day job has been abstracted away by smarter, more intelligent people who have spent their lives to give the rest of us the convenience, and ability to build things we can imagine. For example, I was reading about LSM-Tree Compaction process, and how it evolved over time to provide better guarantees/performance in Database Systems, and some of the material presented in the text I was reading seemed self-evident (generally because of the way the concepts were presented). While reading about these texts, I often ignored the references the author drew from many other texts/research papers. There were too many references to count! Perhaps, the same parallel can be drawn in popular Open source software projects as well. There are many contributors to such projects, many of whom I will never know in my lifetime, who push the boundary of what the software is capable of over time. All of these people’s efforts combined have made the act of programming and building things truly a joyous activity.
Many of the programming escapades of mine, start of with the conviction that, with the tools that I possess today, I must be able to fashion something tangible out of abstract imaginative, sometimes half-baked, ideas. If it were not for people who do the important, difficult and plodding work, none of this would have been possible. I extend my gratitude towards people who have made it fun to program, and who inspire me as well to do the important work.