I no longer build software

LoL, just go build some software dude. In the last two years I wrote a compiler, a brand new log store, heaps of other things, and I did them while doing my job.

If you actually care about your craft and can say no from time to time, the amount of interesting work you can do is limitless from the perspective of human capability.

Holy shit, this is me!

A couple things to clarify:

I posted the original issue as a minor complaint about the docker cli and promptly forgot about it. I never expected it to get any traction or follow-up. At the time I posted it, I was working as a contractor for my former full time employer. I had left full-time work there in early 2017 to attend the full-time program at the (sadly now-defunct) Furniture Institute of Massachusetts[0].

I finished that program in early 2019, and split my time between commission work and part time work for other woodworkers. Like software, in woodworking there are things you learn at school and things you learn doing it for money.

In early 2020 (which now feels like a million years ago), my partner and I left the Boston area for her to take a job in the northern hinterlands of NH.

It's been an interesting year to say the least: A lot of the opportunities I was hoping to have to publicize my business have been canceled (craft shows and fairs, open studios, etc) due to the pandemic. I'm fortunate to have brought a couple of paid commissions with me when we moved. Owing to the pandemic, the schedule on them has been protracted. I was going back and forth to Boston to fulfill a teaching obligation until early March. Then the pandemic hit, and all of my suppliers and my shared shop space[1] closed down for a couple months.

Just before the shared shop closed, I grabbed my workbench and set it up in my living room. The place we're renting doesn't have a basement, garage, or anything resembling shop space, so that was the least bad option. I bought wood for a couple of house projects, and got going working entirely by hand. The first project was a desk for my partner. I built it following the design for a staked work table from the Anarchist's Design Book[2]. She's been working at it since, and we've been doing our best to manage my noise and her Zoom calls separated by perhaps as much as 20 feet.

Sometime in late May or early June things started opening up slowly. I bought wood for those projects, and the shared shop space began operating with extremely limited hours. I've wrapped up those couple of projects, and honestly, the next thing on my TODO list is to spend some time doing some business planning, re-shooting some of my earlier work, and updating my website[3]. Bad timing on the pithy github comment on my part; had I known it'd hit the top of HN, I'd have made it after I updated the website!

If you're in the Boston area and would like to see some of my work, the Cabinet on Stand shown on my website is on display at the Fuller Craft Museum[4] in Brockton, MA through November 8th. It feels a bit weird to mention it, but that piece is also for sale through the museum. Purchasing it supports not only me, but also the museum. They were closed for a long time this year as a result of the pandemic, and like a great many of our cultural institutions, they're hurting. They laid off the curator for the exhibit my piece is in due to budget issues.

If I can offer everybody only one thing to get out of this, it's that our cultural institutions live a fairly fragile and perilous existence, particularly the smaller ones. The Wharton Esherick Museum[5] in the Philadelphia area is also taking a beating. Please, please, please take some time to support these institutions. A lot of our shared culture doesn't make it to the MFA. Those headline institutions show a limited subset of stuff; there's so much of value in the smaller museums, galleries, and historical societies.

[0] http://furnituremakingclasses.com

[1] https://claremontmakerspace.org

[2] https://lostartpress.com/collections/books/products/the-anar...

[3] https://longwalkwoodworking.com

[4] https://fullercraft.org/event/2020-biennial-members-exhibiti...

[5] https://whartonesherickmuseum.org

Totally on board with not building software any more. In fact, at 55 this is my last week of it. For real. Basically, everything sucks more about building software nowadays more than I remember it sucking before, from the mere mechanics of navigating through an obscenely large pseudo-object-oriented codebase to the WRONG constructs/idioms people use to build distributed systems to the way software is packaged and deployed to the horrific attitude toward testing or documentation to the biased interview processes to ... I could go on forever. I know some of that perception is mere nostalgia or other effects of my own age, but by no means all and I honestly feel less than half.

Building software was never simple or easy. We've gained a lot of knowledge that makes it easier because you don't have to build quite as much from scratch, but we've more than made up for that by making it unnecessarily hard in every other way. Taking the simplest change from idea to production involves so many steps, and not even the steps that assure it's correct or maintainable. It's feeding the beast we built ourselves rather than the one born of necessity.

I sincerely feel bad for people who have to stay in it. Some day most of you will get over the dollar-induced Stockholm Syndrome that seems universal among junior developers, but by then you'll be stuck on that train to hell. Good luck to you.

> The web is a very poor fit for what most people want designed.

The web is an application development platform that's split into two pieces with a critical security boundary in the middle, which causes basically all of its problems because every web app has to be a distributed system. If you can constrain what you want to build to either a set of pages and forms or a single client-server app that sits in a sandbox and uses the browser as its display buffer, that makes it manageable.

The default (and indeed only) language for the web not enforcing type safety is also a handicap. People will eventually build a shell inside it where compile time type safety can be mostly enforced.

On the other hand, the alternative is worse: a proprietary platform which shifts unpredictably and from which the owner can ban you.

The great thing about chickens is that they debug your farm for you :-)