I always liked building things.
I built mazes (from decommissioned punched tape). Then LEGOs, and robots made of LEGOs.
Then I built software for the robots, and then… just pure software.
I had always built these things because it was fun to build them and because the result itself was fun to play with.
Then, software became a vocation.
Building good software, even just working software, was is hard.
Didn’t add a test before writing a fix? The bug will come back. Flaky CI? Users will complain that releases are broken. New index but forgot to do it CONCURRENTLY? There goes your weekend.
So you had to care and get good at building, which was is rewarding in itself: learning, trying, succeeding and failing, teaching others.
There’s a long and storied tradition of FAFO-ing things in software. You just had to put in the effort. You had to care. There were (almost) no shortcuts.
But recently there’s been a lot more Fucking Around and significantly less Finding Out, at least in the short-to-mid term. I hope some people will still care about the craft, but it seems likely they won’t have to, and maybe it’s time to accept that.
So while the future plays out, I’m going to keep building.
You don’t have to care anymore. But I still do.
I’m in it for the love of the game. Always have been.