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Okay, so this is the most clickbaity title I've ever had.
Before you get your pitchforks, let me explain.
And no, neither your job or you as a human being is meaningless, just wanted to put it out there before we start.
With that being said...
Why am I here?
If you're reading this, you're probably a developer. In other words, your job is to write code (and/or attend meetings depending on your seniority level).
When describing your job to a non-technical person, you might say:
"I use my keyboard to write instructions for the computer to achieve the result I want"
(I'm assuming you don't want to admit to copying everything from Stack Overflow)
They might ask you:
"How do you know what code to write?"
The answer is, as always: "it depends".
On a very low level, if you want to write a loop, you're going to use while() for instance. If you want to create a class, you'll reach out for class keyword. I like to refer to this process as "translating thoughts from your mental language into code".
Things get complicated once you move up and up, to see the bigger picture.
At some point, it's not about the loops, ifs, variables and classes. Patterns emerge, modules and systems talking to each other, with varying degree of success. This is where engineering comes in, figuring out how to create the bestest architecture for your app, with the microest microservices and the best libraries you can find.
The thing is, none of it matters. Unless you...
Build the right thing
Whether you're building products, apps or even open source libraries - you want other people to be able to use whatever you created.
This post is not about finding a market fit for your product (there are whole books about the subject, written by people smarter than me). It's about you not wasting tens of hours of each week of your life building the wrong thing.
Let's talk about users.
Users generally want two things:
- They want to be able to use your app to accomplish their goals
- They want to be DONE using your app so they can move on
As an example: no one enjoys logging in to Twitter.
The act of putting a username and password into input fields is not producing any serotonin in humans [citation needed]. But it doesn't mean that other feelings cannot be brought into life by this tiny form.
When it's broken.
Once your users cannot log in, nothing else in your codebase matters. You might have rewritten your entire settings page to use VueCopter 3.4.0 and no one will even see that.
(One might argue that the entire Twitter login page being down might be actually beneficial to humanity but this is a topic for another post).
This is why quality, ownership and caring deeply about your users is so incredibly important.
If a pizza delivery website has a payment flow broken, their entire codebase is meaningless. Call it pizza raison d'etre, if you will.
"I want to give them money, why won't they let me do that?"
Focusing on users creates better products. It can also help you write better code.
Deep understanding of your domain (and honestly, giving a shit) allows you to not only translate JIRA into your favourite programming language. Your job is to solve problems with code. The goal is not to waste precious hours of your life building things that are solving the wrong problems or none at all.
Sometimes you might end up not writing any code at all to address a problem. Maybe other team already has a solution to your problem. Maybe (gasp) talking to other developers is sometimes more beneficial than tackling the problem alone.
Bottom line:
Focus on users and solving their problems. Give a shit and great code will follow
PS. Yes, this entire post was inspired by me not being able to pay for a pizza online. No, I'm not hangry, you are.
Top comments (2)
I remember having to hack the DOM of a website once so i could sign up for a train-ticket subscription i needed.
They had deprecated the old platform, which tho ugly, served the purpose.
Great success i dare say! :D
Fantastic. Thank you. I very often think that a large chunk of "code" as it is seen by developers, only has relevance in the developer environment and none outside of it. Like composers getting really involved in an argument over sheet music.