I am aware that some thoughts I have each day are well....a bit geeky to say the least, I look at a myriad of websites every day, usually to read about the subject I've searched for, only to discover that I'm actually thinking "how have they built that" or "thats a cool idea", so quite often, my attention has left the subject I was interested in in the first place and moved to dissecting the technical/design features of the particular website I'm looking at. Personally I think this can only be a good thing but I was interested to look back and see if I've always been this way or if it was purely down to being a developer.

My first jump back in time was to my days as a graphic designer where I used to irritate friends and family by commenting on the colour/font usage on a menu or bus shelter advert or flyer....or whatever. Now, to be honest, I still find myself doing this, only these days, I tend to keep it to myself...makes for a more enjoyable night out for everyone else who's with me!... but rest assured, when I'm out for dinner with you, I'll be silently critiquing the menu design, when someone hands me a flyer or I pick one up and you catch me staring at it...you now know what is running through my mind.

My second jump back in time is to when I briefly worked as an Instrument Technician dealing with pressure and temperature gauges, I found I had a whole new interest in what the current atmospheric pressure was and what effect it would have on the weather for example, and also I checked the pressure of my car tyres a lot more and moaned that the pressure gauge wasn't even on the same scale of accuracy as the super expensive gauges I calibrated at work.

My third jump back in time goes way way back to my childhood when I was "king of lego", I remember specifically looking for things to build out of lego for when I got home...I also remember looking at what my friends had built and using some of their ideas to build new super fancier models!

So I can only come to the conclusion that yes...I have always been like this, I tend to throw myself into what I am doing and fail to switch off. This must be a common trait for developers in particular as pretty much every one I know will be toying with some new technology, building some test application or researching something in the background. I also know that going to the pub can quickly become a full on discussion about what we could do with flex, ajax or some other current buzzword. Many people can get out of bed in the morning, go to work, come home and do something else...not me...and I know I'm not alone in this! I'm definitely not the first to coin the phrase "always on" but I think it suits us perfectly...so, enough of this time wasting...back to the code!