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Discussion on: What is the best part of being a software developer?

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Brent • Edited

The things that always jump out to me:

  1. It's all the creative and technical satisfaction of engineering, but without many of the constraints of engineering in the physical world. It's hard to "refactor" a bridge after you build it or change the logic of a digital circuit once it's been etched into silicon. Software development is engineering and building and problem solving with a fluidity not found in most other engineering domains. We actually can (not that we always should) tear it down and start over or pull out a load bearing column(ar data store) just to see what happens and put it back together again just as easily.

  2. It's truly a cross-domain/cross-industry career. While the fundamentals of software development remain fairly consistent or at least move slowly, we can pick up our skills and move to new industries on a whim. In the 20 years-ish I've been doing this, I've had the privilege of working on everything from Martian rovers and cloud computing infrastructure to cybersecurity tools and video games. It's amazing to be able to gain so much breadth of knowledge in so many areas.

  3. That sense of accomplishment when it actually works like you designed it to. 20 years later and that's still one of the things that keeps me going. The "ah-ha!" moment of figuring out a complex bug or the satisfaction of stepping back from the keyboard and watching the complex virtual machinery do exactly what it's supposed to. It never gets old for me.