If I had to pick the best moment in any engineering project, it is when I am building on top of an engine I've spent time and energy to pour a powerful basket of functionalities into it. After climbing over that severe slope, suddenly everything is a breeze to do and you are at cruising speed, a brief moment of pure joy before smacking face first into a wall of production chores.

Yesterday was such a day. I've implemented Live Writer tagging support by simply writing and plugging a HtmlTagProcessor into a HtmlFilter which is plugged into a PostFilter which is used to process new or updated posts flowing in. Tags are collected and processed all together neatly and available to pages in the blog-specific tag space which has link to site-wide tag space which has links to popular public tag spaces. All that in a couple of hours and a series of sweet satisfying smiles. Akismet? Wham, done in minutes and awaiting to be tested.

The joy is not as great as it used to be though. When I was young, I could just sit and crank out code for days like a drunk might puke after drinking all night without a single compile nor test then when I run it, it used to compile and run dreamily like a corvette cruising at 150mph on highway 5 at 3am heading down south. And everytime, I used to get that huge smile all to myself. Now that I am older and less of a juggler, it's hourly cycle of test-driven fits. Oh, well. I've gotta do what I gotta do to feel that juice again and it sure beats having to babysit junior engineers and making empty promises to executives.

If Joi ever wondered why I've suddenly quit We Know, it was because I've missed this kind of joy (now that's a lot of joi/y. LOL). In a way, it's like grinding every weekend for months with the guild to get Rag except it's just me and miles of code.