Alive Creative Endeavours
What makes software engineering interesting to me is that I aim to practice it as an art. I know that is not the common perspective. Yet I have found that in order to produce more meaningful software I have to go beyond the craftsmanship.
While writing non-trivial code my most productive hours are when I enter a space where time does not exist in the usual sense and there is no experience of a linear sequence. Merely the opposite, what you work on is already complete in essence and only needs some sort of translation, focusing on different areas from moment to moment. It's a journey of discovering the various aspects of that completeness. For lack of a better word, let me call it creativity. Which might make it more plausible that I call an art. And like every art it requires that you must have mastered the craft sufficiently.
It takes time and concentration to get in that space, some call it the zone, and unfortunately it takes usually more effort to get into it then to drop out of it. That is why I prefer to work in my home office, where interruptions are minimal.