On Developing as a Passion

In an recent interview, a fellow developer asked me what my career goals for the next five years were. This was a hard question to answer, as goals imply specific, defined end points. If you read the definition of, “career,” you will find, “a profession for which one trains,” but even this puts the emphasis on, “profession,” or, “a paid occupation.” But to me, it’s not about specific achievements, goals, or positions; it’s about the process I take to reach those achievements, for only with a solid path will the achievements along the way be worthwhile.

So what does this mean for me as developer? It doesn’t take much to learn programming and to get an application to work. Anyone can write a for loop or an if-else statement and have the code fulfill the defined requirements. Doing this is not enough. What does take effort, is finding the best way to get your code to work, and how to keep it working, despite all future changes. Is this done by learning different languages, frameworks, and libraries, to best know the right tool for the job? Is it gained by learning how to best structure your code using principles, patterns, and clean architecture and design? Or perhaps this is done by knowing when to use the right paradigms, or when to build in microservices versus monoliths?

The answer is that building a proper career in software development takes all of these. If you focus too heavily on any one element, while neglecting the others, you lose. It’s not enough to just learn new languages, you have to know how to structure what you build with them. It’s not just enough to simply write code, you have to learn how to test it. It’s not enough to excel in but one paradigm, for another might be much more well suited for the tasks at hand. And it’s not enough to figure out how to do this solely on your own, for true growth comes only through working with others.

And that’s where I see my career over the next five, ten, twenty years. I want to be working on all types of projects, in all types of paradigms, using all types of languages, frameworks, and tools. I want to learn methodologies to write ever more beautiful code, that is low in cost of change, and high in simplicity and structure, and the architecture and languages to best do so for the given requirements. I want to learn this not from just from books, but from experience, and working with others who feel the same drive and passion. I want to overcome challenges and become a specialist through generalization, and to look back at the years that have passed, and see a vast diversity of work, in a wide variety of problems, solutions, customers, technologies, architecture, and design.

And so to ask what my career goals are is a hard question for me to answer, because for me, it’s not about the goals and the destination, its about the journey. This blog serves as a way to visualize that journey and what I learn from it along the way.