Don't be protective of your code

Seasoned engineers know code is merely the paintbrush for good art

And for some, the code itself is a part of the art - another facet of the whole

I totally agree with this, you can make a machine that tells the time or you can make the most beautifully crafted time piece as art. Elegance in the architecture of software is the thing I'd always defend, I can live with people telling me to add semicolons or don't put {} around string attributes in React, even live with them wanting me to rename my functions - but don't mess with the grand plan ;)

I read this following years ago and still love it:

Every programmer occasionally, when nobody’s home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It’s a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world.

This file is Good Code. It has sensible and consistent names for functions and variables. It’s concise. It doesn’t do anything obviously stupid. It has never had to live in the wild, or answer to a sales team. It does exactly one, mundane, specific thing, and it does it well. It was written by a single person, and never touched by another. It reads like poetry written by someone over thirty.

Every programmer starts out writing some perfect little snowflake like this. Then they’re told on Friday they need to have six hundred snowflakes written by Tuesday, so they cheat a bit here and there and maybe copy a few snowflakes and try to stick them together or they have to ask a coworker to work on one who melts it and then all the programmers’ snowflakes get dumped together in some inscrutable shape and somebody leans a Picasso on it because nobody wants to see the cat urine soaking into all your broken snowflakes melting in the light of day. Next week, everybody shovels more snow on it to keep the Picasso from falling over.

Programming Sucks

Yes Jon, code is a form of poetry when in the hands of an artist. And growing as a software developer happens best when we apply the same processes there that we can apply to make our lives better in general.

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Writing code is like mathematics, this is a highly personal creative approach to solve problems. It's very linked to your personality, I definitely agree with you.