Whenever someone asks me "what I do", and I tell them that "I program computers"- they usually: visibly increase their estimation of my mental faculties by pronouncing me "smart", while gleefully proclaiming their ignorance (and/or lack of inherent aptitude).
"I could never program computers," they say, "you must be sooo smart," they say.
To which I reply that "programming computers isn't really all that hard. I mean, it's kind of like, if you wrote down instructions for baking a chocolate cake, gave them to an 8 year old and waited for the results from the kitchen. Which you then have to eat, to figure out if you've gotten the recipe right. Otherwise, you revise your recipe, rinse and repeat."
(And I know that many more people have read and followed recipes that have ever attempted to write one, but, you've read a recipe, you've seen a super abstract painting, and thought: "I could totally do that", right?)
Anyway, that usually gets a laugh and then maybe we talk about other things.
The analogy I really want to make, about what my job is really like, though, is something "like, if you're Gordon Ramsay on Hell's Kitchen Nightmare Chopped, but the meal takes weeks to cook, your sous chefs all live in different timezones, and you can only communicate over text messages."
Which can sometimes definitely feel not dissimilar to getting an 8 year old to bake you a chocolate cake using only WhatsApp.
My talk is about discovering the answer to the titular question (aka 🤔wait, what do I do anyways? aka do you wanna come listen to me talk about it?) and these are its sections:
- 310 YAGNI and abstraction addiction syndrome (AAS)
- 320 TREAM (Tests rule everything around me)
- 330 beware trends and other mind cults
- 340 emulate the sprinting centipede
- 350 how to be good