To quote ESR, "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch." For me that truism underlies the passion that gets all good hacker

To quote ESR, "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch." For me that truism underlies the passion that gets all good hackers into designing and implementing software. It's the very linchpin of what makes a good software engineer. Someone who's driven to build something, even if its yet-another X. It's "the bug" that I expect to see in any half-decent job candidate for an entry-level position. Dismissing that seems, to me, tantamount to taking all the fun out of programming. That being said, I do find atom kind of silly.