Ask HN: Software devs with 10 years experience, what do you still love about it?

Less is more :)

I shipped my first commercial project at age 11, in May of 1978. 44 years later, writing code every day, I'm still trucking, and I don't think I have ever worked a day in my life. There have been days where it has been tough, there have been days where they've tried to micromanage me, there have been days when I was bored, and there have been days where the pay wasn't so great, and if those times lasted more than an acceptable amount, I went and found something else to do for someone else. I get paid money to play. What I have studiously avoided is getting pigeon holed or type cast into a singularly defining role that prevents me from exploring.

I will note I've burned out once or twice for a few weeks, until I woke up and realized I was in a horribly toxic environment. And then I simply moved on and found some other exciting project to work on.

40 years here. I am amazed at how much raw computing power we have available at our fingertips. I bought some Raspberry Pi Pico boards, just for fun, a few months ago. These devices far outperform the VAX 11-780 that was a monster of a machine (at least to us students) back at Rose-Hulman. These devices were $4 each!

When I first got a modem, it was 1200 bits/second. Now I routinely shove data through the air at 100,000 times that speed, to save the hassle of using an ethernet cable.

My first big boy computer had a special hi-resolution card that did 640x480 in 6 color mode. I reprogrammed the CRT controller to give me an extra line at the bottom, which I put the date, time, capslock status, etc. into.

Now I have a 32" monitor with 1920x1080 pixels, and I could get more, except I really can't see more detail than that! At 60 frames per second, with no interlace, and 24 bit RGB color. At the display is only a few pounds, and thin!

Hard drives... I remember riding along with a friend to install a 10 Megabyte Corvus hard drive, I recall wondering how in the heck it would ever get filled. Back in those days, before I got a modem, each and every byte came from a keystroke someone, somewhere typed. Now I have microSD cards with 3200 times that room, that cost $3, retail!

The hardware is amazing. So is the software! Turbo Pascal was $49 back in the day, which came with an excellent manual. You needed that manual, as that was your only guide to the language. Now we have Lazarus, an open source Pascal on the internet, with full access to source code, and a wide variety of components for almost every need.

The same is true for a wide swath of languages, and operating systems. You can write a program in any of about 10 languages, and there will be support for it across Windows, Linux, MacOs and other platforms.

GIT - oh man, git is amazing. I used to have to store source code in .ZIP files, and put those on sequentially numbered floppy disks as my only method of version control. Now you can put things in a folder, run GIT against it, and PUSH it to github, or any other number of repositories in just a click or two.

Open source is amazing.

It's all amazing. You can build anything you want, most of the time things are so fast you don't even have to try to optimize them. I wrote a program to figure out gear combinations that would fit a given real number ratio, in Lazarus. I was done coding in about 30 minutes or so. The first time I ran it, it was done almost instantly. It had run through millions of combinations.

How can you not be excited to have these types of tools? You can solve problems for people across the world. If they find it useful, they can extend and improve it in ways you didn't anticipate. Those changes might be very useful in turn.

I'm especially looking forward to the roll out of capability based security in the next decade. It will bring back the fun of the old days, as you'll be able to just run ANYTHING against your picked set of files, resources, etc... and know it can't damage/change anything outside that selection.

Freeing up computers again from the threat of infiltration will be an amazing lifting of a weight we've been under for far too long. I hope I'm around to see it happen.

The future is awesome.

PS: Oh, and multi-core... that $4 Raspberry Pi Pico has 2 cores... everything has multiple cores... you can run more than one critical task at a time, and not get bogged down!

I love delivering. Seeing a vision realized. Love that in combination with hard to solve problems (whether its tech, organizational, strategic). I only get hands on keyboard when any of the teams I support need help, or when we're approaching a complicated domain. Recently that has been a parallel architecture for high-throughput/load & fast latency of AI/ML model inferences.

(10y in, weird position to explain between engineering, business strategy, and management)

The same thing I liked when I started: hacking on random things and making ideas into tangible entities. And that's basically the only part I like which, as you get more senior, can become less and less prevalent.

My advice to avoid burnout is to keep hacking on your own weird ideas.