The Developer's Journey
I’ve been a developer for a long time now. I’ve seen others start down the path. I’ve seen people make mistakes and picked them up and helped them continue on their journey. I’ve seen their trials and tribulations. I’ve seen their highs and lows. And everyone’s journey is different. But there are some pretty common things I’ve seen along the way, especially amongst the most successfull.
Starting Out
In which the person sees an opportunity. It could be as simple as wanting to change the color of a texture or an operating parameter of an item in a game. It might be more complex, like automating some calculation in a spreadsheet, or it might even be some “advanced” thing like parsing some data out of a set of text files and then doing something with the data. But the developer rejects the opportunity and decides it’s easier to do it by hand or just live with things the way they are. After living with the problem for a while it turns out that someone the person knows has some experience and somehow, with a few deft keystrokes and function calls, solves the problem, almost magically. Armed with that new knowledge the person tries to do the same thing themselves.
Learning and Growing
Of course, doing it themselves is hard. At first it’s simply struggling with the language itself. What are the keywords? What kinds of loops and collections are there and which ones should be used when? Slowly it starts to make sense and they’re thinking less about how the language works and more about the problem they’re trying to solve. This kind of thinking expresses itself as levels of abstraction where the boundaries are between things. At first everything is ints, floats, and strings in a single giant method. As they progress in their ability and understanding they start to coalesce into types, libraries, and executables.
Systems, data, and their interactions start to be the driving factor instead of what a method or library does. They start talking about the problems in problem domain, not the code domain. Who took what? What’s the most efficient way to get that person from home to a hotel in a different city? How can we ensure that all of the food we need is made, everything we make is used, and leftovers are used to help those in need?
Sharing
At this point in their career, the developer is deep in the code. They understand it. They understand it’s place in the world. They know how a change in one place will have some unusual impact to something else. Not because of a problem, but because they understand the underlying connect between those two things. They’re usually very happy in that place. Often, they never leave.
But sometimes they do. Either they recognize themselves, or someone (a mentor or manager) points out to them that they could do more, for themselves and others, if they want to. They can teach others. They can help connect people and things. They can expand their scope and purview to include more and different things. They not only solve problems themselves; they help others solve the problems they have.
They recognize that being a developer is not just about code. It’s also (mostly?) about people, businesses, problems, and how they are all interrelated. Connection, influence, and passing on the learnings about how to avoid problems become the primary goals.
Or, as I’ve put it before, a developer’s career progression is about scope. Are you just looking at yourself, your team, your company, or your world. The broader your scope, the further you are in your journey.
Of course, I’m not the only one to look at the developer’s journey. According to Joseph Campbell, the developer’s journey goes through 17 distinct phases, often broken down into 3 acts. To wit:
- Departure
- Initiation
- Return
Wait a minute. That’s not the developer’s journey, that’s the Hero’s Journey.
They’re two different things, aren’t they? Consider about Bilbo Baggins. He didn’t ask to go There and Back Again. He didn’t even know that such a thing was possible when the story started. But he went. He learned. He understood. He had a wizard and good friends to help him along the way. Then he came home. And made the shire a better place. For himself and everyone else.
Maybe the developer’s journey and the hero’s journey aren’t that different after all. Something to think about.
