Eye Of The Beholder

In My 20 Year Career Is Technical Debt, the author outlines how most everything he’s worked on is eventually deprecated and replaced. It’s a hazard of technical work, where new approaches, frameworks, and solutions are being invented regularly. We’re not building cathedrals that will still be standing five-hundred years from now. At least not in the sense that the stuff of our creation, the ones and zeros, are still going be on a storage medium and flowing through a CPU long into the future (with some rare exceptions).

But that’s not the point. What you build doesn’t matter, it’s all going to end up technical debt (if you’re lucky) or deleted (if you’re not). What matters is the outcomes enabled by what you’ve created, and the relationships you’ve developed along the way. If your code plays a part in improving people’s lives for some period of time, then it’s done its job. And if those around you are better for having collaborated on it, you’ve done yours.

That’s all we can ask for. And it’s enough.