Around the time that I was eight or nine years old, my parents started to think about building a home out in the country. Back in the early 2000s, that meant my mother got a lot of home plan books from the local library. I didn't really understand the larger purpose behind the books, I just thought that they were so fun to read.
Most of the plans were just variations on the same theme: single-level suburban ranch-style homes with 2 or 3 bedrooms. I got bored of those pretty quickly and would flip through the books to find the outlier plans, which included features that sounded exotic to a young boy growing up in a 3-bed/2-bath home in the 'burbs: libraries, media rooms, half-size garages for yard equipment, guest houses.
I'd read through the books and imagine myself walking through the house, going up stairways, stepping out on to screened porches. I started to make the connection that every home starts with a plan, confined within walls and a roof, and then varied upon according to individual needs and wants.
Coding feels like that to me. Software is fundamentally similar in structure and individually different. The languages and frameworks can power Fortune 100 companies just as well as small ones. It's a different in needs and wants, rather than a difference in kind. And whenever I'm launching into a new project, it's still that same joy of discovery and planning, walking through an imagined structure, thinking about what I'm going to do there and dreaming about the cool features that I will get to put in.
Most of the plans were just variations on the same theme: single-level suburban ranch-style homes with 2 or 3 bedrooms. I got bored of those pretty quickly and would flip through the books to find the outlier plans, which included features that sounded exotic to a young boy growing up in a 3-bed/2-bath home in the 'burbs: libraries, media rooms, half-size garages for yard equipment, guest houses.
I'd read through the books and imagine myself walking through the house, going up stairways, stepping out on to screened porches. I started to make the connection that every home starts with a plan, confined within walls and a roof, and then varied upon according to individual needs and wants.
Coding feels like that to me. Software is fundamentally similar in structure and individually different. The languages and frameworks can power Fortune 100 companies just as well as small ones. It's a different in needs and wants, rather than a difference in kind. And whenever I'm launching into a new project, it's still that same joy of discovery and planning, walking through an imagined structure, thinking about what I'm going to do there and dreaming about the cool features that I will get to put in.