The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

So true. I have tried building from scratch so many times for specific use-cases with my own opinionated experience only to recreate the bloat over time. That’s actually good. The alternative was building something based on momentary spark of creativity that no one, not even me end up using.

Some truth in there, but I have to admit that most simple static generators I have written I wrote out of fun and curiosity and not because I thought all existing ones had flaws (even if they did).

It is okay to do things and abandon them later, that is how we learn. We programmers are multipliers, which gives us special responsibility. If we create a shit tool with a shit workflow that wastes time, we waste time multiplied by the number of users of our software. If we save time or bring joy, the same is true. That can be beautiful and devastating.

But every software needs to be maintained somehow and maintainability is a technological choice as well. I have an embedded project running for well over a decade without a single maintenance step of either the hard- or the software. I could have built that project also with more dependencies to the outside world, or in more sophisticated ways with more moving parts, but I wanted to not deal with the consequences of that. This choice isn't always easy, but it is a choice. Ask your sysadmin which things worked for the past decades without having to touch them and investigate. Typically it is boring tech with boring choices.

Another aspect the article does not tackle is that if you know to repair or build many things, people will naturally also come to you asking you to do precisely that. But that again produces maintenance work and responsibility. This is why I like working in education, you can show people how to do it and then it is their project.

I'm seeing myself in the text, but one aspect that doesn't seem to be covered enough is the ego.

I find joy in receiving praise from my colleagues when they have good experiences with my tools.

> Is this chasing windmills?

Yes. Well, "tilting at," jousting specifically. The figure relates to the comical pointlessness of such an act; the windmill sail will in every case of course simply remove the lance from the rider and the rider from the saddle, and turn on heedlessly, as only a purblind or romantic fool could omit trivially to predict.

> You just don’t see as many romantic technological catastrophes like those anymore.

The 90s were a period of unparalleled economic surplus in the United States. There was more stupid money than at any other time and place in history, and stupid money always goes somewhere. Once that was tulips. This time it was this.

> I miss them!

I miss the innocence of the time, however amply undeserved. But I was young myself then.

There is the curse of knowing how, and maybe more importantly there is the curse of other people knowing you know how.