Do you ever feel a burning desire to just solve the hell out of a particular problem? Usually this happens in the context of performance optimization, but it ca

Do you ever feel a burning desire to just solve the hell out of a particular problem? Usually this happens in the context of performance optimization, but it can be anything. Maybe you're supposed to be working on something else, but all you can think about is your pet problem. You throw a bunch of stuff at it, and mostly it doesn't work, but the failures don't discourage you at all; making any sort of progress is addicting. You look at other people's code. You read blog posts and research papers. You fill up notepads. None of this feels remotely like work. It's fun, and you simply cannot stop until you finally grind the problem into the dust. My guess is that the author of this code was possessed by a spirit like this. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe he was just assigned by his manager to write a cosine function that met a certain performance threshold, and he immediately had a general idea of how to do it, and banged it out in an afternoon. But I doubt it. My point is that, if you have felt this way about programming, you are doing "real" programming. It's not about whether you're writing a web framework or a cosine function. It's about the thrill of the chase.