I'm going to have a bit of fun here. I have known two types of developers. The ones practicing creation magic and the others, specializing in alteration. When

I'm going to have a bit of fun here. I have known two types of developers. The ones practicing creation magic and the others, specializing in alteration. When creation mages see a problem, they create a solution. The power of their mind allows them to come up with the exact thing that needs to be created for the given problem. Their creation skills are honed so well that they get incredibly fast. They don't need to look around much since there's no point in paying attention to what they have created before. Their old creations already solved their problems, they work, they don't have to be disturbed again. Of course creation mages are not stupid, they simply tend to focus on a direct path towards a solution. If some mana could be easily saved by using something already created, they certainly wouldn't pass it up. They would reuse what they've already built. There are just way too many things around them, and it's hard to determine if something fits. After all, they have to keep going without delays. A good creation mage has learned to keep things sufficiently neat. They frequently remember things that they could reuse here and there. However, when one observes any such mage at work, one often sees a lot of mess. Some of the mess has occasional patterns, some things are interconnected, but for the most part it's a very complicated and disconnected system of various moving parts working autonomously to solve their individual problems. Alteration mages work a bit differently. They are often slower than creation mages, especially in the beginning. That's because they spend quite a bit of time studying their surroundings. They take longer to solve a problem. The thing about alteration mages is, they can't handle mess. (They are accustomed to altering, not creating.) There is a certain compulsive quality to their mind, they simply can't relax in the presence of something unnecessary, when something could be altered instead. You'd often see such mage cleaning their workspace leaving it neat and stripped to bare minimum. They don't have many things in their possession, but spend a lot of time learning about potential things out there that they _could_ have if they wanted. Alteration requires deep understanding of systems, something that can never be quite mastered due to such huge variety of abstract models. That's why alteration mages grab onto every opportunity to learn about a new sample system, a way things could be arranged, patterns, frameworks. When a problem arises, they don't simply create a solution, they build a system which naturally causes that solution to occur, along with keeping all the existing problems solved. In other words, if plants don't grow, alteration mages would try to augment their biosphere in a way that achieves harmony, while creationists would simply generate some water. Both alteration and creation mages gain experience, level up, and become more valueable. However, they learn slightly different skills. Creation mages learn to have high morale, learn to be calm, and treat solutions as black boxes. They learn to trust their own judgement. Alteration mages on the other hand learn a pretty crappy lesson. They learn that most of their decisions turn out to be incorrect. They build out a system and suddenly get attacked with a problem which the system can't accommodate. It happens once in a while, and they struggle to have everything redesigned from scratch. They end up burnt out, because they can't give up their quest for minimalism and elegance. Yet, it's not all that bad. You see, alteration mages have a very important advantage. They always tend to record their practices and principles. Old and experienced mages would pass on their knowledge to the newbies. The newbies would build upon it to improve elegance of their systems. In essence, an alteration mage is never a lone warrior, they are always standing on the shoulders of the giants that came before them, which is what makes them strong. One of the first things a newbie alteration mage learns is that what they think is right will soon turn out to be wrong. They are too inexperienced to take the multitude of fairly common scenarios into account. At the same time, they quickly learn to be patient. When an elder passes down certain knowledge or framework upon a newbie, it will not be immediately obvious why things have to be the way they are. After some time they finally see that the knowledge of elders has already accounted for so much and in such an elegant manner that they don't need to worry about these problems any longer. They've already been solved by elder alteration mages in the cleanest ways possible, polished by generations of mages that came after them. Some newbies would rebel, against the elders, but only a few lucky ones actually manage to contribute anything useful, albeit this drive of ambition, trial, and error is often what causes major advancements for the whole guild, akin to the evolution process. Eventually, alteration mages manage to outperform their creation colleagues while leaving clean and elegant systems behind. They would sometimes cringe looking at poor creation mages gluing together half-baked solutions to things that are so deeply understood within alteration circles. Their pools of mana are not nearly as deep as of these performant creation wizards, but mana pools are just a small part of their power. Majority of it comes from the knowledge of frameworks. Certainly, if a problem is completely out of ordinary, they may resort to some creation magic, but for the most part you can count on them walking that extra mile towards finding a well-integrated solution.