Comment by aucisson_masque
6 days ago
> Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans. Steve Jobs was wrong: we do not need to carve the unseen feet in the sculpture. Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed. If anything we build endures, it won’t be because the codebase was beautiful.
I think it comes all down to that, do you have pride in what you do or you don’t ?
I make a wall with bricks, even if it will be covered with coating i will do my best to have regular joints and pacing.
Could make it faster, no one would notice the difference but me… i hate that feeling when you done something and you know it’s barely enough, just barely, it’s kind of shit and you really don’t want others to see it.
On the opposite side, some people will take pride in building wall twice as fast as me and won’t care it’s horrendous.
Both cases are valid, but me i know i can’t do a work I’m not proud of.
Totally agree with you that pride is important, but there's definitely more. Being a good engineer is frequently a problem of design --- whether it's user experience or code abstractions. Design is partly art, and that makes us artisans at least some of the time. The code that I've written that has endured the longest --- decades --- has been code that was designed well.
> I make a wall with bricks, even if it will be covered with coating i will do my best to have regular joints and pacing.
Absolutely. This is at the core of it.