Working from home has changed how we collaborate and how often we’re asked odd questions by people outside tech. One of my favorites is: “So… what exactly are you doing?”
Given the world has changed quite a bit these last few years, a lot of us developers are now periodically working from home. Opinions on whether that’s good or bad are mixed, but that is not what I wanted to talk about here. Given this situation, I was confronted with a new kind of confounding question: “what are you doing?”.
To clarify, I’m not talking about what we (as developers) are doing on a business-functional, enterprise or consultancy level, but what we are literally doing when writing/creating applications. Actually writing words that compile into something that can be ran and that does a thing.
I’ve mostly been working on web applications, meaning I mostly have my VSCode or Visual Studio open. When my girlfriend, family member or random home intruder walks past me when I’m working at home, that is what they see. A dark screen full of characters.
Obviously, the go-to depiction of this is the following (at least for us millennials):
(And let’s be honest, that is downright how we want to see ourselves.)
Before, when we were working at the office almost exclusively, these kinds of questions didn’t arise, because we were surrounded by people who were at least somewhat tech-savvy.
The first time I got the question, I started explaining enthusiastically:
“Ok, so here is my function that is rendering HTML based on the amount of entities I got from my database, conditionally adding a CSS class based on the state and the order in which they should be shown. This button updates the database entry and sends an update event to my Function App, which in turn notifies the customers back office…”
At this point, the person was looking at the ceiling, their eyes moving suspiciously high up behind their eyelids, their arms wide and hands raising to the ceiling while humming mantras and drooling.
Fair enough. I don’t understand much about finance, fashion, construction, cars, or dancing either. There’s a lot more I don’t know than I do.
(Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.)
As time went on, my partner kind of got to the point where she understands what I’m doing, although she still says I’m super weird to want to do this stuff for a living.
Sometimes, I wonder about that too:
YAML pipelines.
Failing bicep deployments.
Inaccurate build errors
Fixing alignment issues
At some point during all of this, you get a kind of flickering sense.
If I fix this last little thingy, I think I got it.
You hit CTRL+S. The build starts. Your eye twitches.
Your fingers set in motion the series of actions that you've done an unfathomable number of times before, in order to start the next attempt.
Whatever it is you're doing, starts building/compiling/deploying…
Your "normal" eye starts imitating the behavior of its twitchy counterpart. But then…
Suddenly, everything in the world starts making sense. You feel like the single greatest technological king in the galaxy because your alternate icon now aligns with the three above it.
Because achieving the thing you set out to do is rewarding. That's it.
After you’ve watched Azure DevOps fail for the 47th time, the one successful run feels euphoric. After a Bicep template finally deploys cleanly, you want to deploy ten more just to prove it wasn’t luck.
But the reward isn’t just personal ego. At Zure there is a collective urge to tackle and overcome challenges. When one of us succeeds, everyone shares in that satisfaction.
(This meme will never be not funny.)
So when I try to explain this whole thing to someone, it usually ends like this:
“So… money?”
“Yeah. Sure. Let’s go with that.”