Watching a documentary from the Ferrari factory who makes the body for the FF model I notice something interesting. When they craft the aluminum parts for the body the narrator says: “each part is welded together by craftsmen”. That quote implies that repetitive tasks performed day in and day out are indeed something that requires a genuine craftsman. Now compare that to how the software industry tends to portray a craftsman coder.

I’ve been wanting to create stuff on a computer ever since my dad got us our first PC back in the late eighties. Every year spent in school was one year keeping me from what I really wanted to do, program all the time. When I landed my first job at Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK) I was on top of the world, programming shit for a living! I am not a very intelligent person and I’m an average coder.

I get to deal with a lot of developers and a lot of different teams being an architect (yeah, I just run around like a headless chicken). There is one thing that I have been noticing over the years and that’s what this is about. Great teams and good developers create what is required for a task/story and nothing more. That doesn’t mean they just put some random shit together. No, they create simple thing with high quality.

At my current gig we are working hard on splitting up an old monolith which is the wart of the our business. This work is time consuming and it takes a long time. Why not write a new system and make a switch once it’s complete? This question gets asked a lot by people who come to our company and by various stakeholders. They are frustrated by the fact that breaking up “the pile of mud” takes a lot of time and effort.