Coding does something to the brain.
It structures it. It also introduces a dopamine reward mechanism when you get a high when you get it just right and things worked as you tell it so. No other activity that I know of allows such precise control.
Coding itself is easy. Everyone can learn it in a week or less. But organising code, specially at scale, that's the interest.
If you persevere long enough you will inevitably arrive at a hairy mess you created and you will need to fix your own entangled code.
Arriving at this pain is critical to appreciate why design patterns exist and what practical value they offer.
I met smart, knowledgeable people working in operations but when I read their code I got a gut reaction to it. It was unmanageable. Unreusable. Maybe it's how their messy brains work.
But I keep finding the people that do the best work in operations/infrastructure/cloud were for a long enough time developers. They think in layers and single responsabilities, reusability and decoupling. Naming, punctation, attention to detail matter, because compilers don't tolerate typos. Or sub- or dis- missively ignore errors.
Every time I open a shell script and I don't see what I'm gonna call now EU mode (
set -eu) or its better partset -euo pipefailat the top I get worried.
Everyone should be exposed at coding. Coding should be mandatory at school, even if just for a few lessons. For most people it will not stick. For others, it can become addictive and it will change how they approach problems. It's a great mental tool.
Programming languages are the midway between human languages and math (nature's language).
Made with some <3 not a lot