I'm in for the programming part.
I remember my very first proper program was a LinkedIn auto connect script I made for a friend of mine so he can (obviously) connect to as many people as he could. It did not go well when I was testing it: I got banned for quite a while on LinkedIn. But I was quite proud of it. I really poured my heart and soul into making it run. Programming was my mental way out back then.
When learning how to write proper code from a course, I felt that same thrill again. I was writing magic words that feel like incantations, opening a secret mental portal to an unknown world in my mind. I was connecting the dots, solving a mystery that I was quite sure I was the only one know about it. Coding was (still) the crack.
At the start of my transition to become a professional software developer, I was learning on working on a proper software product. People from my team were so into making the product better than ever. And I thought I was into it. I forced myself to pay a lot of attention to meetings that revolve around sketching the product’s roadmap, or feature refinement, or requirement development, but the yawning just didn’t stop coming. I told myself that I need to know the product in and out, that I must remember all the business flows, that I might get a shout out one day if I could contribute something to make the product more refined. But I was just disinterested in all of it, no matter how hard I told myself to focus.
But then I learnt that I’m in for the programming part, not the product part. I was so awake in meetings that discuss performance. And there was once time I was arguing back and forth with my team leader about a single SQL change that can resolve the bottleneck issue we were having (Spoiler alert: I lost). Bored by the specs, but thrilled by the code. I kept reading back and forth an article about guard clause, and I remembered I was so pedantic about telling everyone I pair-programmed with that “Hey, instead of nested ifs here, why not a guard clause?”. They were annoyed, I could tell, but I just could not stop myself. Why bothered yourself with things about “We need to develop this” instead of things like “We need to make it better”.
Solving mysteries and connecting the dots are just much more fun for me. Implementing new features means I get to write code, sure, but that comes after I understand the specs. For debugging and optimizing stuff? I could just dive head-first into the error logs, which I don’t mind reading somehow, and spend hours just to tinker with the switches or knobs. I don’t know, there is something super addictive about them. Making a query go faster, even though it might be fast enough, occupies more space in my head than implementing a business flow, which is more Herculean and critical for the project.
Resolving issues and optimizing performance often come with little or no specs at all in my experience. People just come to me with “Hey, we have no idea what this is and how things lead to this, can you help?” and I feel like a super hero saving the day. And the even sweeter part of this is that I (sometimes) get to decide the acceptance criteria, since my clients just want to get it done. This might be weird to say, but there were times I still marveled at the poor solution that I proposed, knowing that it did not get accepted, but at least I got it out all by myself.
Now that I’m working with side projects, I feel that much more often. I would love my apps to have more features, and that would attract more users, that’s the norm, but I cannot just get myself out of tweaking that very same function to make it run a bit faster. That might be the reason my coding agent has such few features at the moment. Sure I can just get the AI to pump out more features for me and as long as it works fine, my app gets more feature-rich. But something tells me not to do so, that I have my own red lines, that I need to keep myself grounded and go through each line of code to ensure they are up to my very own standards.
That’s why I think I’m more into the programming part. I just get excited about the neat, old things, not the shiny new things.