Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham have been the pioneers of the agile software movement, which is becoming mainstream. In their talk for the hacksummit they reflect on their life-long career as programmers and how they still enjoy software development. It seems to me that the key is the joy of constant learning and digging into new ideas. This probably applies to many other areas of life.
Look at at their great session: http://youtu.be/ShOMGASbcJ0
Important points:
- Design Patterns
- Refactoring
- Know your tools
- Write beautiful code (“it does what you expect”)