Back to the (coding) rabbit holes

I like getting up early and trying to catch the sunrise with my dog Harry. Usually I would then soon start my journey to work, but Covid changed all that. I decided to use the extra hour in the morning to get back into coding. It's been over 15 years since I was seriously coding so it was a bit of a challenge to actually practice again what I've been preached for so long. Here's my main insights on how the developer experience changed.

• At its core, coding hasn't changed: you still have to design, code, debug, build, deploy and analyse issues. But new languages, tooling & frameworks have made it a very different experience.
• Google search got (a lot) better at helping you find what you need. There is also tons and tons of content that helps you learn the skills you need (update 2023: chatGPT is even better)
• All this stuff for free means that a lot of barriers that existed before are gone. (Cloud capacity, Development frameworks & components, IDEs, etc.)
• Development is (still) not for everyone. Logic is unforgiving, requires patience and is sometimes hard to find. But when that moment of clarity arrives it is pure bliss.
• EcmaScript has evolved beyond anything I considered possible at the time. Frameworks like NPM, React, Angular, but it's a challenge to keep the code readable (at least for me).
• Taking regular breaks (or in my case having to do the day job) helps you to avoid getting stuck in Rabbit Holes.
• Never leave the code in a state where it is not working. For this reason defining the smallest possible functional gains is essential (aka Agile.). Technical debt creeps up very quickly if you do not revisit the code regularly.
• Investing in setting up DTAP, TDD and deploying frequently from the very start gives so much peace of mind, even at a small scale.
• Depending packages keep changing and staying up to date forces you to revisit a lot more code than I would have been comfortable with in the past

Dealing with unforeseen complexities are still very much what defines the craft of software engineering. I will never reach the level again that I was at 15 years ago, but I've noticed that experiencing the full complexity of coding first hand again helps me to have much better conversations with the team on how to manage these situations as best as possible and that can't be bad !