An Ode to Software Engineers

We are an odd bunch. We spend our days staring into screens, or sometimes into nothingness trying to understand a problem we’re trying to solve. We also spend our days trying to convince other humans that the problems we’re solving are hard and that we need computers to solve them for us. Worse, once we’ve convinced our fellow humans of the problem we’re trying to solve, then we get the unenviable task of being as precise and accurate as possible to get the machines to solve the problem with a solution we have to come up with. We doodle on paper, we scribble on whiteboards, we type into text boxes that send them into the ether only to appear as blips on a screen somewhere else. We try to keep as much of the context of the problem and the solution in our heads while juggling the myriad issues we encounter just in the course of writing out the programs and documents that surround the key endeavour of problem solving. At the end of the day all those things we’ve written down into code or documents get filed away only to be tweaked or read a few more times later, like an ever unfinished sculpture that changes form the more we realise what we actually want at the end. We tend to move from task to task, from requirement to requirement, from project to project, ever chasing that better way of doing things while ending up with good enough solutions at that time. We almost never recognise the work we’ve done a few weeks later, often cursing under our breaths for why anybody would do it this particular way instead of my way – only to look at the history of the code to see that it in fact was past us doing it our way. Our tastes and sensibilities change quickly as soon as we learn about new ways of doing things, trying out different approaches the moment we get the chance. <a href="https://betterprogramming.pub/an-ode-to-software-engineers-3b7c045ba97">Learn More</a>