Skip to main content

I'm not a passionate developer

A family friend of mine is an airlane pilot. A dream job for most, right? As a child, I certainly thought so. Now that I can have grown-up talks with him, I have discovered a more accurate description of his profession.

He says that the truth about the job is that it is boring. To me, that is not that surprising. Airplanes are cool and all, but when you are in the middle of the Atlantic sitting next to the colleague you have been talking to past five years, how stimulating can that be?

When he says the job is boring, it is not a bad kind of boring. It is a very specific boring. The "boring" you would want as a passenger. Uneventful. 

Yet, he loves his job. According to him, an experienced pilot is most pleased when each and every tiny thing in the flight plan - goes according to plan. Passengers in the cabin of an expert pilot sit in the comfort of not even noticing who is flying.


As someone employed in a field where being boring is not exactly in high demand, this sounds profane. We should all be passionate developers! I wonder how well a job interview in tech goes if you say that you want to do boring stuff?

Perhaps it should go well. Frankly, the term passionate developer is misleading.

A passionate airplane pilot probably does not fly close to the ground or try to do a 747 loop-de-loop. Similarly, a passionate developer doesn't cowboy-code the whole backend with Remix in one sprint just to get a dopamine rush. A passionate developer is passionate not only about being nice to colleagues but also about code quality in a way where their fingerprint remains unnoticed, much like the airmanship of a skilled pilot. 

My airplane flying friend and I derive pleasure from a clean, by-the-book (by-the-documentation tbh) solution. I'm not too keen on leaving my mark on a codebase. The library I (and only I) love shall remain only on my personal pet projects. That must make me a dull, undesirable 1x engineer.

If everyone writes unpassionate code like me, that is likely a bad thing repressing the growth of new, better ideas. Perhaps a codebase needs, from time to time, someone who rewrites the weird auth part over the weekend in a manic flow state. However, my gut feeling is that we developers are a bit too biased towards doing just that.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Emit structured Postgres data change events with wal2json

A common thing I see in an enterprise system is that when an end-user does some action, say add a user, the underlying web of subsystems adds the user to multiple databases in separate transactions. Each of these transactions may happen in varying order and, even worse, can fail, leaving the system in an inconsistent state. A better way could be to write the user data to some main database and then other subsystems like search indexes, pull/push the data to other interested parties, thus eliminating the need for multiple end-user originating boundary transactions. That's the theory part; how about a technical solution. The idea of this post came from the koodia pinnan alla podcast about event-driven systems and CDC . One of the discussion topics in the show is emitting events from Postgres transaction logs.  I built an utterly simple change emitter and reader using Postgres with the wal2json transaction decoding plugin and a custom go event parser. I'll stick to the boring ...
Post a Comment
Read more

"You are a friendly breadwinner"

A recent blog post by Pete Koomen about how we still lack truly "AI-native" software got me thinking about the kinds of applications I’d like to see. As the blog post says, AI should handle the boring stuff and leave the interesting parts for me. I listed down a few tasks I've dealt with recently and wrote some system prompts for potential agentic AIs: Check that the GDPR subprocessor list is up to date. Also, ensure we have a signed data processing agreement in place with the necessary vendors. Write a summary of what you did and highlight any oddities or potentially outdated vendors. Review our product’s public-facing API. Ensure the domain objects are named consistently. Here's a link to our documentation describing the domain. Conduct a SOC 2 audit of our system and write a report with your findings. Send the report to Slack. Once you get approval, start implementing the necessary changes. These could include HR-related updates, changes to cloud infras...
Post a Comment
Read more