Hey there,

Blaise Pascal once wrote:

"The most important thing in life is the choice of a trade; chance disposes of it."

Looking back, I think he was only half right.

Chance put the opportunity in front of me. It was the decision to act that changed my career.

When I was at Sun Microsystems, I happened to notice my teammates spending hours sifting through raw server logs. Some were asking in a chatroom why there wasn't a better way to do this?

I didn't plan on building a log-parsing tool. I just decided to solve the problem that was right in front of me.

That one decision opened doors I didn't even know existed.

After a few weeks of piecing together PHP and shell scripting (I was a programming newbie at the time), I had a minimum viable product.

It became an internal tool that saved my team dozens of hours each week.

More importantly, it taught me a lesson that Zig Ziglar phrased so well and I've carried with me ever since:

"You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough people get what they want."

By solving a daily headache for my colleagues, I earned trust, sharpened my programming skills, and opened doors to my next role, and ultimately my career in software engineering.

If you feel stuck right now:

Look around your codebase or team processes. What is a repetitive pain? Then build a solution, for example:

• Build the CLI tool that automates a tedious setup.
• Document the obscure build error everyone hits once a month.
• Fix the flaky test suite that slows down deploy pipelines.

Look closely; there are always problems to solve, friction to remove.

When you build tools that make other engineers' lives easier, your career often follows.

What's a small internal tool you've built that ended up having an impact? Or what's a tool you wish existed today?

Curious to hear! Hit reply and let me know ...

/Bob

P.S. My first tool was nothing fancy: a simple PHP interface over a few shell scripts.

It taught me a lesson though I still believe today: Mastery over Hype. Technology changes. Solving real problems for real people is timeless.

If you'd like to hear more, I recently joined a few podcasts where we explore these ideas in more depth, from learning in the AI era to why fundamentals still matter (probably even more now).