I was about 22 and just starting out with ZZ Top.
I was in the dressing room and BB King said to me, ‘Can I play your guitar?’
'Sure man.’
He strummed it a few times and handed it back to me. He looked at me rather quizzically and said,
‘Why you working so hard?’
‘What do you mean?’
'Those strings. You got real heavy, heavy strings.’
‘Well, isn’t that how to get the heavy, heavy sound?’
He said, ‘No! Don’t be working so hard!’
- Billy Gibbons
You wouldn't think the world of music would offer much in the way of advice to the world of programming, but I find myself coming back to this story fairly frequently. It's a good example of how perception begins to take over and lead you astray.
In Gibbon's case, it was the accepted knowledge that to sound good, you needed to use heavy, thick guitar strings. An encounter with BB King, who by that time was already a living legend, lead Billy to try using lighter strings and work out things for himself.
In this story, Gibbon was making things difficult for himself based on his own perceptions and those of people around him. I think we very prone to doing this in technology, perhaps more so. We see this manifest in various different ways;
We over-engineer things in case we need something in future.
We gate-keep, saying that 'real' developers run their own infrastructure, or only use the terminal, or use .
We try to justify the difficulty we have in implementing the solutions we want to build.
We fight with people who are trying to help us do things a better way.
We disregard the solutions of others because we feel we know better, EVEN if we know the simple solution is better.
We sit in our comfort zone and refuse to learn new things, dismissing them out-of-hand rather than trying them out and forming our own opinion.
I've come to serverless primarily out of a means of dissatisfaction with the rising complexity that is elsewhere in software development. I want small, solutions that I can understand within their specific context, that I can compose together to solve problems. I don't want to worry about a whole host of things I used to worry about - because I just don't have time to do that anymore!
I asked myself, 'Why you working so hard?', and chose serverless.
Whenever I'm knee-deep in, and starting to get tangled up in my own code, I ask myself, 'Why are working so hard?', and try to find a simpler solution.
Why are you working so hard?
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