IMO: As a tech person, from the newest frontline help desker to the most senior engineering architect, the most important thing to have isn’t certifications or degrees, but a slightly obsessive, maybe even a touch masochistic, fascination with why. Why does this work? Why doesn’t that work? Why are we doing it like that? Why is that over there on fire? Why am I on fire now?
The reason I believe this is, if love of why is part of your personality, then you’ve spent most of your life honing your ability to quickly break any sort of problem or information down, ingest it snake-like, and then…output…meaningful solutions. You may never have touched Java, but if someone hands you a mysterious Java something and says “this is broken, what do?”, your answer is “great question, I’m not sure, but give it to me and I’ll get back to you”. And when you come back, having crawled through the whole thing, you’ll know what it’s supposed to do, what it is (or isn’t) doing, and how to get from A to B.
To be clear, I’m not putting down certs or degrees. I’d be a bit of a hypocrite if I did. What I’m saying is, knowledge is not nearly as crucial as understanding.
Why am I writing about this? Well I’ve been feeling the pleasure and pain of drinking from the firehose already this quarter. As part of our capstone project, my group is learning Rust, so I’ve spent the last few nights chugging my way through The Rust Programming Language book, and tonight I’ve committed to fleshing out our repo with the initial skeleton of what we’re going to be working on. Can I call myself a Rustacean from having done just this? Nope. Will we have a working emulator written in Rust by the end of the quarter? Yup.
I’m also studying for the Japanese Language Proficiency test, which is happening the weekend before finals.
Photo by Daan Mooij on Unsplash
A few caveats: it’s possible my stance on this is born of my weird, input-craving brain. Also, an obsession with why can lead to rabbit holing and/or burnout, so please take care to not swallow anything wider than yourself and give your brain cool-down time!
Next time I think I’ll write about how cruft affects how one builds programs or infrastructure, and the upsides and downsides of dealing with cruft vs working around it. Either that, or the weird things about Rust. Or both!
