App mindset, Infra mindset

Hey there newsletter readers. I'm Nat Bennett, software consultant and dog namer extroardinaire (current front runners for the next one: "Stroopwaffel" and "Big Hissman") and you're reading Simpler Machines, a weekly letter about computers and how to make them behave better by letting them do fewer things.

In the last few years I've worked as both an infrastructure engineer and an application developer, switching back and forth between the two from team to team and job to job. It's a little bit like the engineer/manager pendulum, but for engineering specialties. Switching back and forth regularly gives me superpowers, and I bring the skills from the other specialty to whatever team I'm on.

Lately, I've been on an application team, so I've been doing a lot of infrastructure work – teaching Terraform, explaining what the big deal is about containers, digging into the details of our build system and deploy systems. I also spend a lot of time helping my team understand and interface with infrastructure teams– because the infrastructure mindset is really different from the application mindset. Each speciality sees the system they work on together very differently, and those different assumptions can lead to conflict if you're not aware of them.

When I have an Application Mindset, I care a lot about the details of one particular application. My app is a "pet," even if the servers it runs on aren't. I'm thinking about what's going on inside of it, what its code is doing and how that code is structured. I'm thinking about the people who use it and what exactly they're trying to do. When I interact with other systems – the platform it runs on, the pipeline that deploys it, the data services it uses, the other services it talks to – I'm thinking about those systems in relation to my app. I care about the details of individual requests. I want everything to be optimized for my particular use case, my particular workflow.

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