I've developed a theory that qualities such as empathy, subjectivity, even aesthetic need to be cultivated. You need to exercise them or they will abandon you. And being a programmer is not always conducive to these qualities. When you spend your time in the land of bits and bytes, 1's and 0's, it's too easy to see the world through the lens of objectivity.

But the world is not objective. As much as we try to claim objective knowledge, the world is too complex to be proven. We inevitably call upon models, we inevitable omit data, we inevitably read bias into our evidence. Instead by claiming our objectivity, we're sanctifying our subjective ideas. If I claim that Keynesian economics is objectively correct, I'm not giving an objective proof, I'm simply trying to sanctify Keynesian economics as an infallible truth.

And by making that claim, I'm neglecting the empathy to comprehend that other people very well have their experiences and their data that indicates Keynesian economics is false.

Great blog post. I think this has to do with the largest companies having the largest megaphones.

When Google writes about how they saved a few bytes by designing their own serialization format and serialization, it makes me, as an engineer who never really cared about those things, feel insecure in my technical decision making. When AWS writes about how they invested tons of effort into improving the performance of EC2 by a couple of percent, it makes me feel insecure that I'm not even measuring my software enough to know if performance has improved by 5%. When Uber mentions the software system they designed to catch a certain rare edge case, I feel insecure because I know I'm not considering all the possible edge cases.

And slowly building 'high-quality' software starts to feel like a Herculean task - there's so much that needs to be thought about! And as my list of tedious-shit-I-need-to-consider grows, I start to lose the joy of programming.

But over time I've realized that not caring about those things isn't a reflection of the quality of your engineering - it's a reflection of the scale you're working at. In a field where there is no limit to how complex we can make things and where there is never enough time to do everything we can dream of, building high-quality software is about knowing what problems aren't worth solving and which ones are. If you have 10 customers, it is poor engineering to spend time enumerating all the 1-in-100,000 edge cases. Write code that fails in the best way possible, that notifies you if this starts to become a common problem, and move on.

Places like HN don't help. There is always a world-class expert ready to give their opinion on how you should be doing things better. But it is important to remember that these people are experts in that area of software - not experts in whether that edge case really matters to your product or experts in how you should be allocating your time.

I used to feel like an imposter before I worked at a FAANG and I realized that they aren't better engineers, they just have more reason and time to focus on the small details.

> I've consciously tried to rewind, to go back to when programming was a tool for implementing my visions, not its own end.

I recently rebuilt a website I built in high school circa 2001 in a modern framework to make it more maintainable. It was PHP 3 / MySQL 4 when I built it. It only ran as it was with a number of polyfills for long gone language features.

The original site was wacky, completely different layouts for different pages, some with characters that tracked your mouse. A ton of creativity. I redesigned in 2008 into a reasonably standard blog format. Looking back during this latest rebuild I feel like so much was lost in that redesign.

The point of having a website when I was in high school was not to write code, it was a place to pour my ideas. Somehow somewhere in the last 20 years the means to an end became the end, and I am not sure how I feel about it.

I’m certainly not the well of creativity I once was, but at the same time the things I do produce are of much higher quality. Is that just the innate balance of life? I really can’t say. Getting older is strange.

This - Hacker News is one of the worst: Arrogant trash highly technical programmers :

"And I realized that the inherent bitterness and negativity of programming arguments and technical defensiveness on the web were making me bitter and negative. "

And indeed this :

"I've consciously tried to rewind, to go back to when programming was a tool for implementing my visions."

At over 50, implementing from a user perspective rather than from boorish technical perspective gives me a fantastic advantage over just technical programmers.

I've disovered the same as this guy.

Emphasising stack over stuff[1] is the programmer's equivalent of emphasising style[2] over story:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23528483

[1] I'm legacy enough to claim one should first design state, then decide on stack: "Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious."

[2] Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o__2ks4XWho

Please add [2010] to the title.

There is some simple joy in being able to let it go and just quickly script something to get something done without any more pretense than just that.