excellence in software engineering isn’t something you can buy. a university can’t bestow it. a title or certification can’t assert it. it’s something one grow

excellence in software engineering isn’t something you can buy. a university can’t bestow it. a title or certification can’t assert it. it’s something one grows over time because they are passionately curious. it grows because they love to explore, to discover, to understand. there isn’t a product that can be purchased and consumed that makes you thinner and fit. software engineering is no different. the only way to grow is to exercise, and the best way to exercise is to love doing it because it is fun. manipulating metal, cloud, laptop, browser, and server are not very different. all can be made dumpster fires. all can be made magnificently simple, or magnificent in some other aspect. all are discoverable, and easy to experiment with. all are at your fingertips, cheaper and more accessible than ever. DevOps is a product, best to avoid the purchase. devops is a fantastic idea. one should be good with infrastructure, because that is where code runs. one should be good with code, because that is what runs. one should be able to reason about their systems from top to bottom and inside out. how else could one simply intuit what is wrong, and make it less so? excellence in software engineering is about seeking out that which is ugly, and making it beautiful. seeking that which is hard, and making it easy. seeking that which is impossible, and making it hard. why would one accept any arbitrary boundary, and think that this reality applies only on one side of it? where we’re going, we don’t need roads. we need curiosity, imagination, and fun.