Pete Warden picked a blog post title I couldn’t refuse:
This script came to mind as I was thinking back over the year for a few reasons. One of them was that I spent a non-trivial amount of time writing and debugging it, despite its small size and the apparent simplicity of the problem it tackled. Even in apparently glamorous fields like machine learning, 90% of the work is nuts and bolts integration like this. If anything you should be doing more of it as you become more senior, since it requires a subtle understanding of the whole system and its requirements, but doesn’t look impressive from the outside. Save the easier-to-explain projects for more junior engineers, they need them for their promotion packets.
The reason this kind of work is so hard is precisely because of all the funky requirements and edge cases that only become apparent when code is used in production. As a young engineer my first instinct when looking at a snarl of complex code for something that looked simple on the surface was to imagine the original authors were idiots. I still remember scoffing at the Diablo PC programmers as I was helping port the codebase to the Playstation because they used inline assembler to do a simple signed to unsigned cast. My lead, Gary Liddon, very gently reminded me that they had managed to ship a chart-topping game and I hadn’t, so maybe I had something to learn from their approach?
I am a huge fan of the concept which, made brief, states that if you do not understand why something is the case, don’t change it. If you do understand it, maybe change it but be prudent about it. It’s also something I have often trouble with, as my natural inclination toward code bases is to use the cleansing power of fire to burn it all down.
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