February 27th, 2004
Rajdeep Singh Chimni (my friend and senior from college) wrote this interesting viewpoint about writing / coding software. I liked it so I thought I’ll share it with my blog family.
It is still possible to take pride in your craft while writing business applications. The problems you work on may seem mundane to you compared to creating video codecs or something, but to your clients they are real world problems with real payoffs if they are solved. It doesn’t take long to see that building software, even when it is software with zero new engineering challenges, is hard to do successfully. Most of your peers are failing at it to greater or lesser degrees most of the time.
You can be better than that. You can apply your understanding of abstract systems and logic and try to solve the hard problems. The catch is, most of the hard problems are not pure engineering problems, but rather involve issues of user interaction, and coping with changes well. Any fool can write a simple web application, but writing one in a way that lasts, that is easy to maintain, that gives as much control as possible to your clients, and scales well when needed — that’s hard, and it takes some discipline.
The reward is that most people are genuinely thrilled when you solve something for them that seemed difficult, especially if you can do it fast (perl), cheap (perl), and better than they were expecting (you).
Sorry, I guess I’m getting a little preachy in my old age. If you really can’t take pleasure in improving the way you do things at your job, maybe you can still have fun surprising them with a cool application of AI to a categorization task, or an OpenGL graph on their reports. But I think the craftsman approach has something to offer, and I look at it this way: if you have to spend all day making wooden chairs, you might as well make the best damn wooden chairs anyone has ever seen.
Thanks Chimni- BTW I have taken the liberty of adding a title to your writing.
