Late Blooming Code

A mantra that I often repeat to myself is, "Don't abandon the behaviors and habits that made you successful." I believe this trap is actually much easier to fall into than most people realize. You can sometimes observe it in the context of a professional sporting event such as American football. One team might dominate the game, playing exceptionally well for the first three quarters. Then, as they sit with a comfortable lead, you see a shift in their strategy. They start to play more conservatively, running the ball more often than they had. Their defense shifts to a "prevent" formation, designed to emphasize stopping any big plays by the other team while putting less pressure on the short game. The leading team often looks awkward in this mode. They have switched their perspective from that of pursuing victory to that of avoiding defeat. They have stopped executing in the way that gained them the lead in the first place. I have seen more than one game ult...

Neal Ford posed a question on Dave Rael's Developer on Fire podcast. He asked whether if you were offered $10,000,000 on the condition that you could never write another line of code for the rest of your life, would you take it? I'll leave it to you to go listen to the podcast if you want to hear Neal answer his own question, but you can have my answer here. Why Take the Money For me, and probably a lot of other people, the purpose of accepting the money would be to gain freedom. Having a sufficient amount of money with which one could live out the rest of one's life comfortably changes one's perspective and position considerably. With $10,000,000, I would no longer need to work. That's probably obvious, but considering how much of our time is spent working in and on our careers, that's an enormous gain. All of that time comes back to me because I am no longer compelled by necessity to go out and earn a living through labor. The Value of Work The difficu...