There are various aspects of my personality which are decidedly ruled by what is conventionally considered to be the right-side of the brain -- the side that handles the warm, fuzzy feelings and such. I have an incredibly vivid and vibrant imagination that is constantly at work no matter what I may be doing and what I may be focusing on. Anyone who knows me has said something along the lines of "nothing can ever be realistically as fun for Trent as he imagines it to be." This may seem like a sad realization, but for the most part it just keeps me entertained even when most people might say they are "bored." These same traits are typically what make me a better fiction writer than I may otherwise be. Similar right-brained functionality that applies to me would be that I can be a very empathetic person (even if I'm terribly bad about reciprocating or responding).

That said, I'm primarily a logical person; namely, for me, even the most minor details are important in some way and there is a reason for everything. But, as for the point of this post, the most interesting things in life are typically puzzles or problems in some form or another. It is for this reason that I always enjoyed programming more than I do writing. Writing is a very enjoyable hobby for me but it doesn't evoke the same kinds of interest and feelings in me that programming does; when writing, there are situations where a story can get "hung-up" on a certain logistical problem (the plot needs to move but there's no particularly "good" way to advance it, for example) but, for the most part, that is a superficial problem that can be approached from absolutely any with no real "best" solution. The reason I enjoy writing has always been the ability to be completely creative with the story -- it's basically just a realization of some idea or scenario I imagined taken to extreme detail on paper. This is a lot of fun for me, but it's not something I can really sit down on a whim and force myself to do. Writing, for me, is a very mood- and idea-based activity that can't be forced.

Programming, on the other hand, is far more consistently enjoyable for the simple reason that, unless it's a very menial task, the amount of problems that I'm forced to deal with are numerous and some of them are incredibly complex. Creating an efficient rendering algorithm with a low memory-usage that requires the least powerful hardware possible is one hell of a challenge and, when it's completed, provides one of the best "highs" imaginable. A frustrating bug can take anywhere from minutes to days to solve but, save for the rare occasion, there's always a logical reasoning for its original existence and the process of determining what those reasons are is an enjoyable one that hasn't grown old in the eight-nine years since I started programming.

What's interesting to me is realizing how various programmers I know approach problem-solving. Some talk it over, some write down every step on numerous pieces of paper, and so forth. I've always been the kind of person who internalizes a majority of the thinking process -- I stare blankly at a related code snippet (or sets of snippets and documentation; I generally require a great deal of monitor real estate for that reason) for, occasionally, long moments at a time internally working through the problem either visually (I used ceiling tiles to organize a structure in my head earlier) or logically in my head. If I hit a road-block, I'll talk to someone about it but, even then, it's generally just a one-sided conversation where even the most basic interjection from a third-party can help me realize a potential solution.

These personality traits manifest themselves in more social settings as well. The kind of people I become friends with are the kind of people who can carry on interesting conversations for an extended period of time with consistency. The type of people I hang around the most, though, are that same kind of person with a clever sense of humor (I'm partial to extreme uses of sarcasm). And the creative side of my personality lends me to extreme amounts of story-telling and analogies over the course of any given day.

There are, of course, downsides to being a more logical sort of person, which I won't really go into (because up to this point the article was written in a single sitting, then I got distracted). The summarized version, though, is as follows. When it comes to arguments, it's hard for me to "give in" at any given point unless the other person asserts their point of view logically and correctly -- "stubborn" is a good word for me. I also will go to some powerful extent to get things to "make sense." And there are instances where smaller problems or details will get in the way of a "bigger picture" and there can be difficulty weighing the interesting aspects of the smaller puzzles or problems in relation to what is, most likely, a more important, larger-scale issue.

But there it is. A crash-course in the description of my personality as I figure it. There may or may not be a bias present.