I'm a programmer because I enjoy solving puzzles, enjoying applying my skills to other domains, and enjoying making computers do cool things. As an example I r

I'm a programmer because I enjoy solving puzzles, enjoying applying my skills to other domains, and enjoying making computers do cool things. As an example I recently built a caching layer for a database that improved the performance of an editing screen by 100x. I could have used a local SQLite database, or a remote. I could have used C or C++ or memcache. I could have used Apache. I could have used JSON. I did in fact use Clojure, XML and basic sockets, with the pure java oracle and pure java sql server drivers. These choices, and the code that needed to be written to make it all work, are what makes me a programmer.