impress yourself

Just recently, I realised how important impressing yourself is when trying to maintain enthusiasm with your job. Doesn't really matter what you do (as long as you care!), but things can go stale if you keep doing the same thing over and over, and never really provoking an "AWESOME! I did that!" reaction. Even if it's only something small (at 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, little things can be fairly impressive!), it can give you a needed boost to productivity (ugh), enthusiasm and general satisfaction with work, life and all that!

Personally, I get my kick from cleaning really crappy data. Lucky for me, I've had a lot of crappy data to clean recently, so I've been able to flex my XPath, Regex, semi-complex MySQL and image manipulation muscles relatively frequently. If you're as much of a fanatical cleaner and hoarder as I am, cleaning data is probably for you. Grab a 50MB CSV and try to programmatically make sense of it. It's fun! I promise.