One definition of a problem is that whenever there is a gap between where you are and where you want to be and you don't know how to cross that gap, you have a

One definition of a problem is that whenever there is a gap between where you are and where you want to be and you don't know how to cross that gap, you have a problem. Programming allows to cross many gaps regardless of importance, and since throwing something across the room into a bin can bring a weird satisfaction to humans you can see how programming can bring them satisfaction. For example: I was on a website that allowed people to comment. Their emails were displayed. It had about a 1000 pages. It was a nice exercise to download all the pages and extract the email addresses. Now I have 709 unique email addresses of people using an accounting software from a specific country. Another example was that I was looking up a job on LinkedIn (being unskilled does that to you) and the Apply button disappeared. I started writing something that requested the page every minute and looked for a specific string that would suggest the job was available again. Then friends called me to go out and I wanted to use my laptop's SIM card to send me an SMS when this happens. Yet another example is my frustration that in my country where most people have prepaid phones, you can send airtime/credit to a subscriber only if you are both with the same carrier, do I started writing a sort of impedance matcher. I'm not a "programmer" but I mainly do that because it's interesting. I've never "shipped" anything or made a living from it but I try things (APIs, OAuth2, Twilio, GAE, Docker, etc) just to have an idea how they work and not to be overwhelmed when/if I have to build a system involving the different pieces.