How to be a programmer and also *like* being one?

As I'm turning another page in my programmer's life, this is my answer from my experience, obviously there is very big crowd out there and do it in lot of different ways.

• Code for personal use and fun. Helped me to learn things that i wouldn't have had a chance in my professional life.
• Innovate. No, I'm not Edison, but i like to do simple things that makes my life easier, my first one, i was so lazy to hit F5 and created auto refreshing html to check for support issues, you have to believe me, till that team use to hit F5 every 5 mins manually, Duh!
• Learn jargon and go beyond XYZ. Learning something new is always fun, 'coz I'll not be using it professionally and no one knows how bad I'm in it, but when someone needs to use it, they may think i know something on that, of course by that time, I'll have to atleast learn to use it properly;-)
  
• Think Architect - Think Naïve. Sometimes i have to think from an architect angle and next minute I'll also have to think like an entry level programmer, kind of chinese Yin - Yang, if i haven't learn to try things differently, it 'd have been a boring work for sure.
  
• To err is human. Slowly learning(!) from initial dog days, I can now appreciate this concept so much now. There is no such thing as Zero Defect, But why the heck TL's expect bug free code :)
  
• Last but not the least, i think someone in future may look into my code. Yeah, i know what i'm writing is not a kalvettu, but atleast later i should not say "what the heck, is that?".
  

Reminds me incident in my first development project, where i decided to side track from normal VB program style, used encapsulation and coded a class to abstract the logic (some vetti work i should say). I had to take off on one day and there was a bug to be fixed, TL after looking in to the code, decided to wait for me to fix it next day though she had really good developer who knows better VB than me. You rarely get these days where you realize, you do justification when coding.

Happy New year 2007 !!!