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You can write "meta" programs that help you maintain existing applications. Whenever I start at a new company, before I get thrown into the heart of things and

by gen220 7y ago

You can write "meta" programs that help you maintain existing applications. Whenever I start at a new company, before I get thrown into the heart of things and become "too busy" to write these kinds of programs, I like to write things that automate the boring stuff. Some recent examples: - a cli for inspecting, adding comments to, and updating the status of JIRA tickets. because our hosted JIRA instance was god-awful slow and their web interface is a mess. - a tool for monitoring things and pinging me with macos native notifications when things crash or complete. Was my net productivity positive for writing these tools? hard to tell. There are some companies full of engineers whose actual job is to write tools like this; I'm not sure what they would do for fun :P

0x445442 7y ago
> There are some companies full of engineers whose actual job is to write tools like this; I'm not sure what they would do for fun :P I think there are a lot of organizations that would be better served devoting more resources to the meta work given the labor and infrastructure costs. I would go out on a limb and say the capital expended on the majority of projects I've worked on in my career had a smaller ROI (because it was negative in most cases) than would have been the case had the organization just invested in improving internal tools and processes of their existing systems.
- gen220 7y ago
  I totally agree with you. I think that most corporations are in a state of suspended myopia. We’d rather direct engineers to improve the effectiveness of a single system by 200% (even though it impacts 1% of revenue), than to impact all (or many) systems by 5%. Yet, most of the impressive software we admire today was built in the environment you prescribe. C and UNIX, famously, but also git, Go, Rust. I imagine many others. How much has C improved productivity, over Assembly and COBOL? How much has Borg or BigTable? The issue, IMO, is that no ambitious manager wants to invest the social capital in defending and advocating for these teams, because they don’t look good until they look exceptionally good.

by gen220 7y ago

0x445442 7y ago

> There are some companies full of engineers whose actual job is to write tools like this; I'm not sure what they would do for fun :P I think there are a lot of organizations that would be better served devoting more resources to the meta work given the labor and infrastructure costs. I would go out on a limb and say the capital expended on the majority of projects I've worked on in my career had a smaller ROI (because it was negative in most cases) than would have been the case had the organization just invested in improving internal tools and processes of their existing systems.

gen220 7y ago
I totally agree with you. I think that most corporations are in a state of suspended myopia. We’d rather direct engineers to improve the effectiveness of a single system by 200% (even though it impacts 1% of revenue), than to impact all (or many) systems by 5%. Yet, most of the impressive software we admire today was built in the environment you prescribe. C and UNIX, famously, but also git, Go, Rust. I imagine many others. How much has C improved productivity, over Assembly and COBOL? How much has Borg or BigTable? The issue, IMO, is that no ambitious manager wants to invest the social capital in defending and advocating for these teams, because they don’t look good until they look exceptionally good.