I just showed a mostly working version of this blog to my girlfriend, who promptly said "you spent all this time working and have nothing to show for it?"

That's when it hit me. She really has no idea what I do. And most people probably don't. Programmers "make computers work".

She saw me working in Photoshop on the design, and really couldn't imagine all of the back-end work that went into getting this site up and running: database access, editing, comments, caching, etc. All she (and probably most people) see is a web page that looks pretty much exactly like what I mocked up in Photoshop.

In fact, I have junk data on the blog now - which she saw - and she perked up and said "oh, you wrote all of this?" She was more impressed by the three long blog entries that I stole than the entire working blog!

Now, I understand that this is probably a good thing. Most people shouldn't know the inner workings of what makes the web go round, but I at least want people to appreciate that for every webpage you look at, there is (typically) a ton of behind-the-scenes work that went into it.

I'm not holding my breath on that one.