Doing Something Useful

As a code monkey, it's hard to remember that computer stuff is only valuable when it does something useful. Here's an example: In my internet programming class (CS 360), I've been enjoying playing around with threads, fork(), mutexes, semaphores, and signals. Learning about the underlying topics has been fascinating, and programming them has been a blast. It's hard to remember that the technology I'm using and building in this project (IP, TCP, Sockets, and HTTP) exists outside of the project. When I'm coding, dealing with networks, configuring a computer, or learning the theory behind all of this, it's easy to forget that it can be used to do something useful.