Two tweets
Here are two tweets that have been stuck in my head since reading them:
They are both true, and the contrast between them points to a fundamental tension that I’ve been grappling with lately: what is worth learning?
There are days where building software feels like archaeology in the best way: very few things are as intellectually gratifying to me as rappelling into an old codebase or third party package, armed with a lantern and a pickaxe. The excavations I make in, say, the Django core repository are so stimulating because it feels so vigorously like proof of my maturation as an engineer. A few years ago, I would not have dreamed of diving into a random codebase to answer a problem I had: I knew it was possible, sure, but it was never a modus operandi. If the answer to a question wasn’t on Stack Overflow, then it either was a bad question or an unhelpful answer, and not worth pursuing. Now, it feels natural: it’s not a “break in case of fire” option but just, you know, an option.
There are days, too, where building software feels like golf: where the objective is something closer to a briskness and conceptual concision rather than comprehensiveness. (Or, to use another metaphor: like Risk, where the goal isn’t to win battles but to avoid them entirely.) As I mature (and my software matures) I understand the value in not writing code — in finding off the shelf solutions, in contracting work out, in focusing on what needs to be done and not what could be done. Working on a higher level of abstraction.
—
I’m reading Outline, which is not a great book but an interesting one, and it had this one passage about writing and, by extension, the comfort of roads where you know the landmarks:
What I miss, Ryan said, is the discipline itself. In a way I don’t care what I write – I just want that feeling of being in sync again, body and mind, do you know what I mean? As he spoke I saw the imaginary staircase rising in front of him once more, stretching out of sight; and him climbing it, with a book suspended tantalisingly ahead of him.
So I guess that tension lies in doing what is comfortable and pleasurable and slightly inefficient. It might not always be the right way to build things but I think it is usually the right way to live.
Still — I resisted the urge to build a custom blog engine for Buttondown. I’m using Ghost instead.
(But I’m writing a custom theme. Because, well, naturally.)
Happy Sunday
I hope you learn a fun fact.