Money, fame, fortune(not the same as money), the opposite sex, tough challenges, even good Karma.

But one that really stands out for me as a software(web) developer is this: The Users. I really care about the users.

I often found myself doing these kinds of things in the last few months:

• application goes down – immediately drop ANYTHING (even if it’s a 3:00 AM on a Saturday night) and try to get things fixed.
• updating a production application – if I know there’s going to be even 2 minutes downtime I’d destroy my sleep cycle and wake up before the crack of dawn to make the deployment rather than causing any inconvenience for the user.
• Monitoring user visit/pageview trends and number of users. In my spare and unbilled time just because I want to know users are happy and returning.

Odd enough, I’m usually working on applications for other customers so the end users don’t even know I exist.

I even disagreed on some occasions with the customer because they wanted to do something which I though was bad for the users.

Sadly, I guess in the end it might be some ego-trip, me wanting to have contributed to an application used and appreciated by many people. I even react differently to requests from different clients, favoring the one with the largest user-base.

Is this bad, is it good? I pretty much don’t care, as long as I make a lot of people happy by giving them a good application.