If you find this place, will you tell me? I will come work with you.
I admit though, that I struggle to codify what “coding as a craft” is. And that worries me. I fear I am really just playing a game of “I’ll describe it when I understand it” up-over-that-next-hill-ism with myself that is illusory and delusional.
It means different things for different people, but for me, it means:
Step one is getting it to work, step two is making is as simple/clean as possible (most people stop at step 1 it seems).
Take time to fix issues / sloppy code when you see it.
Ideally you want the codebase to look like it was all written by one person.
Carefully balance maintainability vs speed or cleverness.
Refactoring is a necessity and should be done periodically. Same with tuning.
Take the time to name your methods/classes/variables as accurately, verbosely and consistently as possible.
Test your shit for bugs before you give it to QA, for the love of everything holy. If QA sends something back, you should feel a little embarrassed.
Take the time to write useful comments. Focus on intent, that way the next person can know if the code is doing what it's supposed to or not.
KISS, DRY, YAGNI.
Up vote on this! I do it once a week -- at least. First, I am frustrated by some unreadable logic, then I look at Git blame... "Oh..." Second, fix it... again!
Unfortunately, that’s not how the market works anymore.
Do the minimum, get to market first, hype features over reliability and performance, get a nice looking balance sheet, and cash the fuck out.
I love writing software, but I hate this industry.
I hear Google is largely like this, but who knows anymore. I hear mixed things all the time. It feels like you have to find a specialized company that may be immune to certain pressures and likely top of their field or the only company really in their given market sector. Maybe Oxide Computer?
I think Supabase might be like this, given their marketing and hiring materials, but its hard to say. They're in a "long game" (according to their founder) so they think more long term. That tends to be a good indicator of this, I think, is seeing long term horizons over quarterly ones.
We're fortunate to have started at a time when VCs were incredibly irrational (read: good for founders), and even more fortunate to have found a lead investor that's patient.
We've been able to build Supabase our own way: hire the right people (mostly international), focus on what developers want (even though they don't pay much), and build open source (collaborating rather than competing). None of these are controversial until you have a profit-maximising VC breathing down your neck.
> They're in a "long game" (according to their founder)
I stand by this. It's a decade-long endeavour to build credibility as a database company and that's not something we can hurry.
AWS is the opposite.
It means working with people who care about the quality of their work.
It means you produce something that works, has some consistency of organization, and most importantly: other developers will be able to come behind you to support and extend it.