I came across this nugget while reading a bit about photography and art. It is so much tempting to replace photography with programming.
Is all of this overwhelming? Does it all sound like it’s too much of a pain in the ass? Get over it. It’s called professional photography. Be good at your craft. Be great at your craft. Think a pastry chef trusts a new oven to be exactly 350 degrees when they set that on the dial? No. They test it. 350 on the dial might mean 380 degrees in the oven. You need to know that. You need to know your cameras. Your lenses. Your lights. Your exposure. Your screens and monitors. You need to test this shit. It’s boring and tedious and all of that. I know. It is. Get over it. Wait till you build color profiles for all your cameras, lights, and modifiers. Be a professional and do it. Don’t be another mediocre photographer. There’s millions of those. Don’t be one. Be great at what you do. Know what you are doing. Do the hard work to learn all this stuff. It’s worth it. It’ll save your ass one day.
It took me back two decades in time. All those experiments to understand the seemingly hard concepts - memory, execution models, networks etc.. Falling in love with linux, open source and dropping the fear to explore unknowns. Seeing the systems as a set of patterns, forming hypothesis and using tools to verify them fast.
These days I deal with somewhat larger systems serving tens of thousand requests per second. And I have grown to believe that software engineering is 99% about people and a fraction of computer science. There may be some truth in that.
Why do we have to be practical anyways?
Let that 1% be our craft. That’s the essence for which we are in business.