I've been programming since I was 8, and I'm now fast approaching 40. This makes it a bit hard for me to isolate the specific influence of programming on my lif

I've been programming since I was 8, and I'm now fast approaching 40. This makes it a bit hard for me to isolate the specific influence of programming on my life habits. That said, I do have a couple thoughts on how programming might have been helpful. For context, the systems I work in are typically nowhere near perfection. This leaves me with a continual list of things to be done that ranges around 5-10 person years of effort to complete. Because of this fact, I have had to learn to be tolerant of the imperfections, organized enough to keep a long-term plan in focus, and tactical enough to fix things in a sensible order. It's also been useful to develop an understanding of when costs are sunk and when ideas aren't worth further development. I'd say that all of this has been useful in my day-to-day life. Something that's come to me more slowly is the human aspect of software development. My earliest programs were all one person affairs: I'd be the only author, reader, and user of the software I wrote. The older I've gotten, the more interesting it is to write software that other people can contribute to, understand and use to better their life. Learning how to build systems that do that is teaching me a lot about design, empathy, and how to think outside my own head. This is still a work in progress, but it's been very rewarding.