this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2026
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Very interesting perspective, thank you for sharing that!
I don't think it has anything to do with how I see the world and myself in it, in my case specifically. When I say coding is a craft, I base it solely on the fact that problem solving using code can happen in so many different ways, and there will be almost as many code styles and problem solving styles as there are coders.
I've seen it when reviewing as many other people's code as I have. I have reviewed what must be thousands of student coding assignments over the decade or so I was in academia, and for each assignment, there was almost no hand-in that was the same, despite the sometimes extremely narrow problem scope. Were they identical, they were usually suspected of cheating or collaborating too closely, and when confronted, usually admitted as much.
And in my soon-to-be decade in the private sector I've seen so many styles as well, even with coding style guides in place. And not just style discrepancies, but just thinking about problems, and different ways of solving them. None necessarily worse than the other (although mine is surely the best out of all the equal ones).
This is what I mean when I say it's a craft. ๐ Everyone has they way. It's much like molding a sculpture, while it simultaneously also can be viewed simply as a tool for solving a problem, by the sole, isolated programmer.
when it actually does become a craft, like it sounds in your case, it REALLY does become something to behold.
the half baked code base i inherited as my primary responsibility at my new IT gig is inspired by the most artisan like proof of concept and besides the recent revisions by my manager and i; 90% of hasn't changed since 2010.
it's a non-profit entity that serves the community so it can afford to keep running in the same manner for extended periods of time unlike commercial institutions typically do -- apparently. the last time i beheld such quality was with my first software engineer job in mountain view, california and it acclimated me to a particular threshold of work that i never expected to see again after leaving silicon valley.
so i was surprised to encounter something that surpassed that threshold after learning to expect to encounter spaghetti in my subsequent years in the field -- and at a cash strapped community service non-profit no less. i think that watching this piece of work trudge along with virtually no updates in almost 20 years and having had serviced over hundreds of thousands of people in the city and surrounding area i live in has to be the highest testament there could be to true software engineering craftsmanship. it literally outlived it creators.
i already know that whatever i end up completing will never be as good as it's predecessor and it REALLY makes me wish that just a teeny tiny fraction of the talent to goes towards making the epstein class richer could be trickled down to community service organizations like ours so that we could build a worthy successor. we and our sister organizations that depend on the software are the only things standing between people and generational poverty and being able to get a fraction of that kind of talent would help literally millions of people in the future. i know for a fact that google, circa 2014, spends more in a single TGIF afternoon of wine, cheese & entertainment than our operating budget for an entire quarter so i CANNOT ๐ STRESS ๐ ENOUGH ๐ HOW ๐ TINY ๐ OF ๐ A ๐ FRACTION it would be.
also: i learned recently that the person who spearheaded the effort to build this proof of concept did it by pooling together the talent from all of the sister organizations even though he was never an employee. he was a retired ex faang software engineer who probably thought of his work in the same way you do -- considering his talent -- and part of me imagined that he was you as i read your comment. lol