Why I Do What I Do: or, The Third Half Of My Life

As of this year I will have been programming for half my life. It's my passion, my vocation, and much of what I have to offer the world. Twenty-two years of software development have given me time to make (and observe) thousands of mistakes and missteps, and I have (as I well should by now) plenty of opinions about our craft. At this point I have to ask myself some fundamental questions: What will the twenty-third year do for me that the first twenty-two have not? What's next for me? In fact: Why do I do what I do? What do I have to offer the world and where do I want to take it?

I say this not only with local interest --- asking myself how to be keep myself happy and support my family --- but also with global interest. Namely, what are the greater impacts of the kind of work I do? How can we in our industry make our customers and ourselves happier, especially now that software is defining more and more of our lives? Over the years I've found myself motivated in particular by the specific things we can do in the short term --- at times counterintuitive and a bit inconvenient --- which can have significant increase on our happiness in the long term.

Here are my current answers to those questions. Another question is: what do I have to offer you in this article? I'm not the only mid-life software developer out there, not the only one to ask where we're going. Hopefully there's some food for thought here. I'd like to hear what you think.

The short list

* The power of symbols

* Craftsmanship

* Meta-thinking

* Kindness

The power of symbols

Back in 1991 or so, I was taking a linear-algebra course and learned that if you take position coordinates and multiply them by a simple matrix made up of sines and cosines, you can rotate that position around a fixed point. Nice idea --- but what did it look like? I had access to a 286 and I knew some BASIC, so that afternoon at the campus computer lab I wrote a program to draw a cube in wireframe on the screen, then nudge it by ten-degree increments in the pitch, roll, or yaw axes driven by keystrokes: for example, L to rotate left by ten degrees. I sat down to a blank screen and a blinking cursor; three hours later there was this wireframe cube floating and turning in space doing just what I had told it to. I was bowled over: if you carve the runes in the right way, you can make a computer do anything you want.

I've lost count of the number of programming languages I've learned since then (about a dozen), and I've lost count of how many hundreds of thousands of lines of code I've written. What remains is this: Coding is good clean fun. It was and it still is.

There's more to it, though. I've always been fascinated by human languages: despite all their differences in word order, pronunciation, and so on, ultimately they all come to make sense when they are studied for a while. Ultimately they are all just superficially different ways to speak human. Programming languages vary more in their capabilities: while most are good for many tasks --- any of them can print "Hello, world" or factor integers --- the differences run deep, from learning-curve time, to runtime performance, to the way they encourage project-busting worst practices or project-saving best practices. Nonetheless, what programming languages have in common is that (along with human languages, mathematics, and so on) they are all ways to systematically encode human thought. And what programming languages have that natural languages and math don't, moreover, is the ability to automate human thought.

This is powerful stuff.

Craftsmanship

It's one thing to make a computer do something; it's another to do it well, to make it easy on the people who use it and the people who'll have to deal with it next. Careful coding gives me pleasure while doing it --- just like woodworking, say. The social practice of craftsmanship is also a valuable commodity. As long as we keep making mistakes and learning from them, every additional year practicing our craft increases our value.

Here's my favorite blog on the subject: http://blog.8thlight.com. Uncle Bob et al. have a lot to say, and they say it well.

Meta-thinking

Craftsmanship has a subtopic worth its own discussion, namely, thinking about how we think. This is something that has always excited me.

It excites me in large part not only because of it usefulness, but because of its strongly counterintuitive nature. We've all had those moments when the door is labeled, plain as day, Push. And yet we pull it. This never works. In our industry it turns out that stepping back from the guns and smoke and details of the impending deadlines and ringing phones to iron out some kinks in the process can result in quicker progress toward those deadlines. It's as though pulling the push-door actually worked.

This isn't new to software. One of my favorite quotes is due to Abraham Lincoln: Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

I should also disclaim that as much as I enjoy meta-thinking, I'm not always good at it, especially when I most need to be: those times when all I can think is I have this pile of logs to chop and tick tick tick!

There's more to say here --- technical debt, root problems, and multiplicativity --- which I'll leave to a separate post.

Kindness

This is a simple word which I'm using in two specific ways. Namely: okay, so I enjoy coding and I enjoy doing it carefully. But (except inasmuch as the journey is the destination) that's more about the means than the end. Software does a lot for us these days. It produces images for cancer scans; it processes inventory when we check out at the grocery store; it guides missiles to their targets.

To what ends should I direct my passion?

For me there are two answers: again, one local and one global. Locally, my work should make its immediate users happy. At my current employer, we make software for the people around us, without putting the software itself on the market (we make a living instead from the results our tools deliver for our customers). So here it's easy enough to see the furrowed eyebrows or the smiling face of the user.

Globally, I want to make the world a better place and I'm not too picky about how. Where I work, we're solving the retirement problem: I can be proud of that. There is work to be had in greentech, life sciences, communications, and so on. Wherever I am, on those days when I get mired in the details and then suddenly stop to think Why?, I'm happy if I can honestly remind myself that my work is being kind to someone.

There's more to say here, too --- the value of software for the people who use it, and for the people who build it --- which I'll again leave to a separate post.

What's next?

I love coding, it's what I do best, and it's how I give value back to the world. But do I keep calling myself a programmer? Maybe not. As I'll write about in the posts on meta-thinking and kindness, I've got a lot to learn about a lot of things.  But this much is clear:

* Already, I think of myself as a data engineer. Software developer per se is just too broad a title anymore --- there are so many of us now that the general title has little meaning.
* Time and wisdom, suitably curated, enable me to use craftsmanship as a commodity.
* My fascination with multiple languages makes me already a polyglot.
* Agile and other workflows create the opportunity for one to define oneself as a software methodologist.
* What I'll call "level-3 work"  in the post on meta-thinking permits a view of certain kinds of software development as productivity multiplication. This is worth thinking of as an endeavor valuable in its own right.
* My biggest growth opportunity right now is in creating more opportunities for disruption at the cross-system level. This requires moving away from the keyboard and into the meeting room more often --- a move worth making.