Life: It's all about love, not personal ambition. I love and am loved by my family. I do meditation and find there that I love and am loved by my higher power. I love others I don't know (and possibly even some I do know) by writing software for intensive-case unit medical devices. Finding a way to use my programming skills to selflessly help others has been transformative.
Programming: Two for the price of one:
1) Really understanding locality of concerns. I.e., creating and using granite-like abstractions so that when I use them I don't have to think at all about what is under the hood. So, when I need to reason through a given piece of code, I have a local and finite amount of the rest of the system that I have to load into my finite brain. I can inductively assume that the abstractions I am viewing as primitives are themselves reliable.
Programming: Two for the price of one:
1) Really understanding locality of concerns. I.e., creating and using granite-like abstractions so that when I use them I don't have to think at all about what is under the hood. So, when I need to reason through a given piece of code, I have a local and finite amount of the rest of the system that I have to load into my finite brain. I can inductively assume that the abstractions I am viewing as primitives are themselves reliable.
2) Beginning programmers write simple code. Intermediate programmers write complex code. Master programmers write simple code.