Reliving my Cyanaogen adventure from last week, I’m reminded of why I love software and why I enjoy designing and building it.
Whenever I upgrade software, it feels a little like Christmas. Yeah, sometimes everything goes sideways, but even so, a software upgrade is like a present for me.
Like a present, I get that excited feeling when I open it, and sometimes, it’s disappointing. When it’s not disappointing, I get the urge to mess around with it. For example, when IE 9 beta was announced, I realized I would need to build a Windows 7 VM, since IE 9 won’t run on XP.
Photo by Dan4th from Flickr used under Creative Commons
I’d heard from Rich (@rmanalan), who ran the Windows 7 preview release for a while, that it wasn’t nearly as terrible as Vista. As usual, he was right; both Windows 7 and IE 9 pleasantly surprised me; they are each quite a lot better than their predecessors.
I was excited enough about them that I went back and read feeds with IE 9 for an entire day, which is saying a lot, considering how happy I am with my Windows-free existence.
I got the same giddy feeling from bumping Ubuntu to 10.04, Lucid Lynx, and again when I installed Cyanogen on my EVO. It’s fun to explore new software, study the changes and wonder why they were made.
I guess that’s why I’ve found a home in product development; I love studying software and (mostly) making it better. That, or blind luck.
I don’t think this is as important a criterion as knowing how to code, but having this type of geeky passion definitely seems to help.
Do you feel like upgrades are presents? Do you get excited to test out a new software versions? I’ll bet a lot of you do, which is why there are so many unboxing photos out there. Yeah, maybe an upgrade isn’t as awesome as a brand new gadget, but it’s still pretty sweet.
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