This collective was founded on a simple idea that you should enjoy the work you do including a strong sense of purpose in order to enrich the lives of your team and customers combined. Profit, while important to keep the lights on, is not the driving force. Building expertise and using software to make life more enjoyable for folks is much more rewarding. Plus, it feels good to wake up each morning knowing you are working in a code base that is well maintained, always up-to-date, a joy to use, and a benefit to society.
The Engineer’s Oath helps us never lose sight of our purpose while our Engineer’s Rigor keeps us honest because you can’t make an impact in life if your environment, codebase, and team is in constant disarray. This definitely takes work, which isn’t always fun but, as the saying goes, nothing in life worth achieving is easy.
This also means having grit to persevere when things get tough and integrity to do the right thing when no one is looking. For comparison, let’s look at the work of others who exhibit some or all of these qualities.
Crafters
Software engineering is both an art and a science. When expertly — and seamlessly — blended together, that’s where the magic exists.
You’ve probably seen or worked with people — if lucky — which are the embodiment of joy while also being extremely skilled at the craft. Jon Batiste, is one example, where his joy exudes from the stage, interviews, and especially in his music. Here’s a few others:
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Leonardo da Vinci: Often cited as champion of the High Renaissance not to mention an accomplished artist and engineer known for being a perfectionist where some ideas didn’t see the light of day and while other ideas took years to complete.
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Antoni Gaudí: Devoted much of his life to the Sagrada Família, sometimes living on-site in his final years. He designed structural solutions decades ahead of the engineering math that would later validate his ideas.
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David Bowie: One of the greatest rock artists, and chameleon, that would constantly reinvent himself every few years (or less) to push the boundaries of what was possible. His last album, Blackstar, was released only a few days before his death.
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Neal Pert: After being known as an excellent drummer in Rush, he relearned how to play the drums by practicing with jazz drummer Freddie Gruber in order to hone his skills further.
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Jiro Ono: Embodies shokunin (see below) ethics of duty and perfection while also known for a tough apprenticeship culture which even excluded his eldest son.
What each of the above have in common is a mastery of the craft through constant rigor. They held onto human ingenuity and inherit skill to achieve greatness while sharing the fruits of their labor in order to bring joy to millions of others. May we all strive for the same.
Sharpening the Saw
You’ll find, in many cultures, that rigor and grit are necessary to hone your craft in order to achieve expertise and a life worth living. The Japanese are especially well versed in this practice with many words representing various forms of this concept:
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Shuhari (守破離): This has been discussed before but shuhari is the life long pursuit of improving your craft by starting as an apprentice, evolving as a journeyer, and finally gaining mastery as a crafter. While mortally impossible to gain complete mastery, journey is where the joy the resides, not the destination.
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Shokunin (職人): Translates to artisan or craftsman which means one who endlessly pursues mastery of the craft with a strong sense of purpose and joy. This includes moral, ethical, and social consciousness to weld the craft for the benefit of others. Sound familiar? Yep, there’s the Engineer’s Oath again.
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Kaizen (改善): Translates as improvement and is most notably attributed with The Toyota Way of working through constant improvement and refinement of processes. This includes a strong emphasis on quality including halting production if quality ever drops below a specific threshold. In terms of software, a good example of this is Ruby Code Quality.
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Takumi (匠): Means artisan, master crafter, or skilled expert. This harkens back to shuhari which is someone who has achieved mastery of the craft through decades of unyielding practice.
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Tatsujin (達人): An expert who has arrived at mastery and who has attained the deepest level of the craft through intuitive, tacit, and effortless skill.
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Dojo (道場): Literally means place of the way which is where folks gather to form unions, guilds, and places of continuous learning.
Habits are the key to achieving the above but can take time to become instinctual. It would be amazing to be like Neo, in The Matrix, and instantly learn new skills with all the knowledge, experience, and wisdom necessary in only a few seconds but, unfortunately, that’s now how we gain experience. First we learn, then we apply, and slowly we gain experience by testing the limits of our knowledge in new and interesting ways to unlock new ideas. For example, the path to software engineering mastery might look like this:
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Learning the basics of the language by first writing simple programs and then advancing to more complex architectures.
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Adding linters, code quality checks, keyboard shortcuts, macros, and anything that augments your workflow while enforcing consistency across all codebases.
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Learning patterns and antipatterns including when to apply them and when alter them in elegant ways.
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Extracting hard problems, solved well, as gems for reuse in other projects.
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Learning from and constantly evolving design choices which might mean refactoring large chunks of an application or multiple gems in order to maintain consistency. This can be painful but is critical to building experience and new learnings on what to do and what not to do.
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Writing and sharing your learnings with others. If you can’t explain it, then you haven’t learned it.
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Creating video tutorials to augment your writings.
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Speaking at conferences and connecting with others to spread new ideas and ways of thinking.
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Writing books and becoming a knowledge expert in general.
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Advancing and constantly evolving to the point where most knowledge is tacit and intuitive. There will always be new challenges but they become faster to debug and solve. This is pure gold because it’s hard won and no one can take that away from you.
This is how you keep the saw sharp.
Expert Beginners
The antithesis of those who don’t practice or understand the joy of the craft are known as an Expert Beginner. These are people who hit a fork in the road and make the tragic mistake of heading down the path of supposed, or self-declared, mastery when they couldn’t be father from the truth.
In short, and much has been written on this already, Expert Beginners tend to stagnate with minimal to no growth. They also have minimal to no ambition. This includes farming out learning, understanding, and personal growth to Large Language Models (LLMs). In some cases, they willingly give up what little expertise they have in favor of handing everything over to an LLM (also known as brain rot). This is akin — and vastly simplified — to playing slot machines and hoping, this time, randomness favors your weakness. Worse, LLMs churn out the lowest common denominator of collective knowledge. This is because LLMs can’t think, can’t remember, and can’t experience growth like humans can. Lastly, Expert Beginners definitely don’t care about software architecture, code quality, maintenance, or team happiness.
Take the red pill, not the blue pill, to avoid becoming an Expert Beginner. Build upon what makes you unique and then share that joy with others.
Conclusion
There will always be liars, grifters, ghosters, fraudsters, and unsavory folk of weak constitution but this is a reminder that there is a better path in life. Harder, definitely, but much more rewarding and worth it in end.
If this appeals to you and you truly care about the craft and the joy of getting up each day to tackle new challenges, learn new skills, write elegant code, and share what you know with others then join our community or add your name to the list of Hand Crafted Coders. We’re constantly working to share the joy by building a better future. We only have one shot at this life, so let’s enjoy it!