I’ve become the same way. Instead of specializing in the unique implementations, I’ve leaned more into planning everything out even more completely and writing skills backed by industry standards and other developer’s best practices (also including LOTS of anti-patterns). My work flow has improved dramatically since then, but I do worry that I am not developing the skills to properly _debug_ these implementations, as the skills did most of the work.
IMO debugging is a separate skill from development anyway. I've known plenty of developers in my career who were fully capable of writing and shipping code, especially the kind of boilerplate widgets/RPCs that LLMs excel at generating, yet if a bug happened their approach was largely just changing somewhat random stuff to see if it worked rather than anything methodical.
If you want to get/stay good at debugging--again IMO--it's more important to be involved in operations, where shit goes wrong in the real world because you're dealing with real invalid data that causes problems like poison pill messages stuck in a message queue, real hardware failures causing services to crash, real network problems like latency and timeouts that cause services which work in the happy path to crumble under pressure. Not only does this instil a more methodical mentality in you, it also makes you a better developer because you think about more classes of potential problems and how to handle them.
For the past 2ish months, I’ve been working on Lattice, my internal engine for my multi-tenant blogging system. Take a look at the code [1] and the live site [2]
There’s a lot of points I agree with but I think what’s important is fully conceptualizing the mental model of your project. Then, context switching doesn’t even induce much mental fatigue.
Don't you have a fully conceptualized mental model of your body, to the point that you are quite functional with it? Isn't your body far, far, far more complicated than any software project could be?
I only have the most vague mental model of my body [0], and I also don’t bio-engineer its cellular innards, which would be the rough equivalent of what a developer does in large software projects.
[0] Which becomes painfully obvious when one ages, as all kinds of things start to hurt, and one doesn’t have a good understanding of why exactly, and how to stop it.
reply