What Do You Love About Writing Code? We Ask, Software Engineers Answer

The annual Grace Hopper event for women in computing is billed not as a conference, but as a “celebration.” So when TechCrunch TV headed to Minneapolis this past week to cover Hopper 2013, we thought we’d take advantage of having so many software engineers in one place to ask about what exactly they were “celebrating” the most: What is it that they love about the act of building things through code?

The answers were all unique, and all pretty inspiring — so we compiled a number of them in the video embedded above. I especially enjoyed hearing Dr. Maria Klawe, the president of Harvey Mudd College, share her viewpoint (starting at 3:30.) Here’s one good excerpt:

“I love abstract problems, but I also love working on problems that might change people’s lives. I think computer science technology is one of the most inter-disciplinary fields there is. It’s a way of parsing the universe around you, and it’s a way of actually contributing to creating new things in the universe.

One of the things I hate about the current state of things is people think of technology as something you use, but not something you create. And one of the things we’ve convinced our students at Mudd is: If you want to make a difference in the world, and if you want to be creative, and you want to solve puzzles, what could be better than computer science?”

Through all the big news TechCrunch covers about venture capital funding and pivots and M&A deals and IPOs, it’s good to remember the individual passions and day-to-day work that lays the foundation for it all.