I can’t say my working life is full of joy. Production issues, deadlines, bad code here and there, developers with their “how?” and “why we need to do this?” and internal users with their “when?” and “why we can’t have this?”. Some days I feel myself like a character from this picture:

But still, I have a few things that make me happy. Here are they, my little joys:

Production release

Imagine the world where writers do not publish their books, artists do not expose their drawings, or programmers do not release their code. Sounds desperate. The most enjoyable part of programming for me is shipping the code to production. Basically any code, but especially if I myself find this code useful.

In the team I currently work at, we have iOS/Android production releases 1-2 times a month. Not as often as I wish it to be, but those 1-2 days a month I am truly happy.

When consensus is reached

There is often disagreement inside engineering teams. Back-end vs front-end, front-end vs designers, backend vs devops, etc. It’s good when people disagree, as during discussions better solutions can be found. But there is not always a discussion, can be silence instead. In such cases I need to participate. To be honest, previously I was biased towards backend. But after I learned React.js and a bit of Kotlin, I became more fair-minded (hopefully).

I like the moments when after a tough discussion a consensus is reached. I think, to improve the quality of decisions, everyone in the team should be full-stack. Well, maybe not full-stack all the time, but have familiarity with all the parts of the system.

When a great idea is born

A couple of weeks back I had a discussion with a guy from Data engineering team in my company. We were thinking how to solve an issue, while touching as less code as possible. After we sifted through all the options possible, and all of them seemed to be so so, suddenly the guy came up with a brilliant idea! I was really touched that moment.

Meet passionate programmers

As in any other profession, not everyone becomes a developer because of big passion. Also, not everyone able to keep the same level of passion for many years. That is why when I meet someone with big passion about coding, I feel inspired. When I see a developer was working over the weekend or long hours, I do not feel sorry but feel happy for him/her.

Write code

Every time I code I feel guilty and apologetic. I tell to myself: “Let everyone do their job, do not put your nose into the code”. But still I keep doing this, because the day I spent writing code is equal to the day when production release happened, great ideas were born and consensus was reached.

There are many other smaller things that make me happy at work, like a piece of chocolate or lunch in a good company. But these 5 things I mentioned are the major ones.