Good Work Takes Time
Hey!
Welcome back to another week of musings.
As you read this, I'm exhausted from a weekend spent moving apartments. Hopefully, your weekend was uneventful!
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Things I discovered in the past week
- How to provide feedback on documents is an interesting approach derived from the book Facilitating Software Architecture.
- On work processes and outcomes, an interesting thought that encourages us to analyze why things go right.
I was recently listening to a podcast unrelated to tech. The person in the podcast visited a museum of the work of a manga illustrator, and they realized that good work takes time; there’s no shortcut. In the case of the artist, it was the progression to develop their style and execute it consistently.
That got me thinking about similarities at work, mainly because I work with some legacy codebases (over 15 years old). In our case, it would mean delivering consistently and efficiently.
While there are always hacks and “quick fixes” that become permanent, other solutions, like how we handle payments, have remained essentially the same since they are based on the experience of the original developers.
All these changes teach us, from less inconsequential ones, like changing For to ForEach or adding Optionals, to choosing the database for the next decade.
Some people leave with this learning and continue learning at other companies, which further infuses their knowledge.
Since we don't treat software as art pieces, it's sometimes hard to know which will be our magnum opus.
On the flip side of all this learning, we might have periods without learning, many fires to put out, and be very busy. Some companies might be perpetually in this state, which makes it hard to do good work.
Some learnings extend to the processes and infrastructure that drive the company. Adopting CI/CD, automated tests, feature toggles, etc., are all practices derived from prior generations' learnings of what goes into delivering software.
These learnings come from other learnings, and we improve one thing or another on each iteration.
Your turn!
Have you ever thought about your current state of learning? And what's good work in your current context? How do you learn more? How do you know you're improving on each iteration? Let me know by replying to this email!
Happy coding!
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