"most of programming isn't great. It's nasty, it's boring..." I get what you are saying, but I don't agree. When I am working on code that I know a bunch of pe

"most of programming isn't great. It's nasty, it's boring..." I get what you are saying, but I don't agree. When I am working on code that I know a bunch of people will use and enjoy, I don't really find the edge cases or testing nasty or boring at all. Or to put it another way: at first I loved programming because it was full of interesting problems for me to learn how to solve. Later I loved programming because other people were using my software and finding it valuable. This shift away from yourself as the end product of programming is essential in my opinion to enjoying programming in the long term, and also much more highly correlated with commercial success. You also have to find a company (or create one) where you can directly do that. A hint - if you often think the code you are writing is pointless or a waste of time you are not there yet.