Do you still feel the magic?

I'm a programmer. I don't know why. But I've been programming for... over two thirds of my life now (don't judge me). And even now, even though I've been traversing these abstraction layers for so long and I pretty much assume that I could tackle any software problem now given enough time (*), even now just making *small* things work has some magic to it. Not even novel ideas, just simple things.

Like the gemini server that serves this page. It's a simple thing. It did not take decades of programming experience to be able to write it. Someone in their first month of programming could have written it, probably even someone in the first week if they had a teacher. But I made it and it makes me happy to see it working. There's a magic to it that I can't quite explain.

Then there's also the intellectual reward of knowing how it works. I understand what it's doing, not with perfect fidelity, but down to at least the syscall level I have a pretty strong idea of how it works. I've never worked on the Linux kernel but I've read enough and have enough OS knowledge that I can take an educated guess at several of the things going on below the syscall level. It's not all at the front of my mind of course but I can focus on a particular piece of it and the knowledge (specific or general) comes to me pretty easily.

(* but there isn't enough time)