I'm kind of fried after spending all weekend staying up till 5 AM writing code. Code for a personal project, no less. I haven't done anything like it in quite a while.

It should be a useful little app — it screen-scrapes our employee directory every night, stores the info in a database, and sends out an email notifying me (and ultimately whoever wants to subscribe) who's left the company, who's newly hired, who's changed groups, who's been promoted, who's gotten married and changed their name, who's converted from a contractor to full time, etc.

I wish I could work like this all the time — get the kernel of an interesting idea, and then just sit down and implement madly for a few days or a week. No boss to go ask for permission, no external groups that I'm dependent on for platform code, no waiting for people to email me back while I'm losing steam every second, no arguing over requirements, no meetings.

Given that the capitalist system is purported to be the most efficient, it's bizarre to me that the corporation — the apotheosis of capitalistic structures — is such a staggeringly bad productivity killer.

Perhaps that's not true in other industries. Maybe there's something special about development as a discipline that doesn't mesh well with the corporation — but I just don't find that believable.