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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

PydanticAI + evals + LiteLLM pipeline

I gave a tech talk at a Python meetup titled "Overengineering an LLM pipeline". It's based on my experiences of building production-grade stuff with LLMs I'm not sure how overengineered it actually turned out. Experimental would be a better term as it is using PydanticAI graphs library, which is in its very early stages as of writing this, although arguably already better than some of the pipeline libraries. Anyway, here is a link to it. It is a CLI poker app where you play one hand against an LLM. The LLM (theoretically) gets better with a self-correcting mechanism based on the evaluation score from another LLM. It uses the annotated past games as an additional context to potentially improve its decision-making. https://github.com/juho-y/archipylago-poker

Careful with externalTrafficPolicy

On a project I am working on is hosted in an EKS cluster with the NGINX ingress controller (the one maintained by Kubernetes). It is deployed using it's official official Helm chart, which I realized, after a lengthy debugging session, was a mistake. The initial setup I aimed to improve had several flaws. Firstly, we were using the AWS Classic Load Balancer in front of the nginx ingress in the cluster, which has been deprecated for some time (years?). Continuing to use it makes little sense to us. The second issue was that we were only running one(!) nginx pod, which is quite sketchy since the exposed web services had essentially no high availability.  I switched to the Network Load Balancer (NLB), which was straightforward - I just needed to change the ingress-nginx service annotation to specify the load balancer type as NLB: service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-type: nlb However, increasing the replica count turned out to be tricky. When I bumped it up to two, I began to ...