Disposable Code Is Here to Stay, but Durable Code Is What Runs the World
Every day I seem to run into yet another post with someone solemnly opining that “writing code has never been the hardest part of software engineering.
Every day I seem to run into yet another post with someone solemnly opining that “writing code has never been the hardest part of software engineering.
And hey, that’s smashing. As an engineer from the ops/infra/SRE side of the house, I feel like I’ve been saying this my whole career. (Is there anything more satisfying than being proven right in public? Not in my book.)
So, which is it? Is writing code a valuable skill that people should practice and build up, or on the way to becoming obsolete; maybe even a skill set that dates you, like cursive writing?
At the moment, engineers are bringing largely the same skill sets and tools to both domains, but this won’t last. The skill sets, tool chains, and definitions of success have already begun to diverge, and they are likely to split into different disciplines entirely.
Some people seem to be carrying around a lot of anxiety about whether the days of durable code are numbered, but I think this is nuts. Both types of software are here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future.
