Thread

This piece by @dosinga resonated with me on why writing software „in the enterprise“ can be so hard and frustrating dosinga.medium.com/toolmakers-and…

I fundamentally agree that building your own tools is a super power and code is a media particularly fit for that. Every program has the potential to encode new abstractions, automate manual work, create new ways in which to think and work.

On the other hand, especially once you write code in a big company, there is quite some stigma to „rolling your own.“

The reasons behind this make sense to me: who is going to maintain it? We can‘t have each team have its own bespoke tech stack, what if people want to change teams? Should we really invest in building something (k8s?) that someone else is much better at?

But on the other hand, we have whole generations of coders who have mostly worked in such an environment who never learned the art of tool building and never experienced the power of creating new ways to work.

Instead, we have people who can combine existing building blocks (services, libraries, frameworks) into business logic and frontend code. But the tools are not perfect and I see so much talent wasted on people memorizing how to do stuff in the framework du jour.