My job as a programmer is to solve problems: customers need something that doesn’t exist yet and I have to solve problems in order to make that ‘something’ into, well, something. My success as a developer is largely dependent on how good of a problem solver I am. I have a large array of disparate tools, a goal, and the resources to build. The work, then, must be to combine all of those in an innovative fashion to produce a result that is cost effective and functional.

I have to admit that before this series of blog posts, I hadn’t heard of the phrase “Triple Bottom Line”, or TPL/3BL. For a long time, though, I’ve felt that the monetary cost that one pays when purchasing items or services does not fully reflect the accurate environmental cost. Instead it only focuses on the exploitation of the difference between paying as little as possible when obtaining items and charging as much as possible when selling them.