I hope Sean Heber doesn’t mind, but I loved his Mastodon thread so much that I wanted to lay it out in one single place to make it easier to read.
There are so many times when things go wrong in coding, but when they go right, you just want to raise it up above your head and say “Behold the pinnacle of code!!”
I remember a very specific time. I was in the middle of a code review with one of my developers, and we were stumped on how to achieve a certain piece of functionality. Not a user interaction, but a low-level, backend piece. You know the un-sexy part of systems. And something hit me. Something that my college professors would be so proud of. The solution in this case was to actually use recursion (literally, the only time I’ve used that technique in real-world running code). And I wanted to shout it from the rooftops.
And yet…no. Number one, no one would care. Number two, it’s literally proprietary code. So, it sits in our codebase. Shining like a diamond in a closed box next to the Ark of the Convenant in some warehouse.
Anyway…please enjoy Sean’s thoughts:
A thing I think about a lot is how it’s very difficult to show off and humblebrag about source code without also straight up giving the source code away.
I know this problem exists for plenty of other creative fields, but perhaps not all of them?
I live near a place that often holds events and the types that makes me think of this a lot are the classic car enthusiast events.
These people drive their old cars up, park them, pop the hoods, and just chill all weekend basically bragging and showing off the work they did and the mods they’ve added or whatever.
There just isn’t anything like this for software. You can’t pop the hood on your favorite bits of source code without straight up giving it away.
Code isn’t easy to appreciate in isolation. It exists within some context. The part I often end up wanting to brag about is how it all fits together.
That elegant little function that really ties the room together can’t be appreciated without seeing the room.
Anyway. It’s just a thing I think about a lot as I work on countless hobby projects that I never release and no one ever sees but, IMO, have really cool bits and bobs in places that I wish could be appreciated somehow for ego reasons.
Something often lost in the programming world is that it is possible to enjoy the process of coding more than the result.
Showing off the results are often not notable, IMO. Probably 90% of the hobby projects I do are things that have been done a million times before, but the difference is that I did them. The process was the purpose.
I don’t know how to show that off or share it, really, without also giving an artifact (source code, app, etc) away.
It was never about the artifact for me.
This is something I’ve long struggled to convey because there is so damn much focus on “results” and “product” and “utility” in the software world.
I didn’t get into computers for any of those reasons. I got into them because I really enjoyed how all the parts fit together.
I didn’t realize that wasn’t so common a motivation until I got to college and all my classmates were just there because computer jobs had good salaries. 😕
