It crystallizes my ideas. In more than one way. It still staggers me that I can think up complicated structures that do entirely new things, even impossible things, and put them into practice using only my fingers and mind. I love architecture more than code, but code is the way to bring the architecture to life.

It also works the other way around. Code helps me think. It's rigid and exact, and doesn't allow for vagueness in ideas. It means that, when I'm coding, I'm required to think things through. It forces me to bring blurry notions into sharp focus.

And lastly, I believe it makes me a better person. Programming is a refined balancing act between abstracting and precision, between simplicity and complexity. Doing that balancing act makes me more capable of handling other situations. It trains your mind to understand complexity and reduce it, just as it trains it to see the problems with simplicity that make it more complex.

Oh, and it's also a great way to pay the bills. But I would still be coding if it didn't, I'd probably still be coding if I had to actually pay money to do so.