Learning to Love Software Engineering

It took me too many years to figure it out

Come join me on a tale of failure and misery, where I re-learn what it’s like to be a Software Engineer!

I miss programming.

There, I finally said it.

I started programming when I was in Grade 10 and I fell absolutely in love with it. I learned on a language called Turing which was very popular in schools across Ontario, Canada. We won’t talk about Turing today, but I did want to say it was my first love.

Fast forward to today, and I have not programmed professionally in close to 3 years since I become an Engineering Manager. I have a decade+ of professional software engineering under my belt, and it’s weird to say I really don’t do that anymore.

My team is so senior that I don’t even help coach them in anything programming related, they could all code circles around me. They are all extremely experienced, and my coaching and feedback is focused on helping Senior Engineers become Staff engineers, or how to operate more effectively in the Staff position. We might occasionally talk code, but that’s more for my interest than a necessity.

And you know what? Until a few weeks ago when I participated in a Yelp Hackathon, I didn’t even miss it. I think writing code professionally burnt me out on the practice. I had stopped doing it in my spare time (more or less) even before I became a manager. It was no longer a fun hobby, just work.

But now that’s changed.

Since most of my background is in Android development (although even half of that is in DevOps related to Android) I decided I would try out Android Dev once again, for fun.

Did you know the cool kids don’t use Java anymore? Kotlin this, Kotlin that! And yes, I see it’s very close to the spelling of my name! (Coltin != Kotlin)

It was very humbling to get my hands dirty again. Maybe too much!

Kotlin is a fun language, full of magic. The magic is nice once you know how to use it, but looking at it without that understanding lead to a lot of “what the heck is happening! Why does this work!???” and it was much worse when things didn’t work. Did I do the magic wrong? Am I missing some other magic?

Thankfully, Yelp approved Copilot just in time for Hackathon, and there wasn’t any magic I could throw at copilot chat and ask it to explain that it failed at. It did a fantastic job, and it really made me miss being an engineer.

While I pay for ChatGPT and I could have copy-pasted things for GPT4, it was nice to ask questions directly in my IDE. Especially since it had access to my local source files. “Why am I getting this error?” and then Copilot tells me which file the problem is in, and sometimes how to fix it.

It still made stuff up and had all the problems LLMs currently have, but it led me to this thought:

In my years as a manager I have never once missed being an engineer, but today is the greatest epoch of time to be an engineer that has ever existed. I am lost for words. Programming is just more joyful. It’s still hard and painful, but I see what’s coming, and the ability to focus on creation is getting easier and easier. While the market is hard today, and so many people are scared for their jobs, being a software engineer has never been this exciting!

Optimism aside, I did face extremely hard moments where I wanted to quit. A lot. Knowing that I was never actually going to finish my project (it would take months) made it easy to go “you could just read a book, you could just play video games, you could just watch YouTube, you could just write the newsletter…”

Android development is not easy, even just trying to follow step-by-step youtube videos left me with tons of bugs and things not working and scratching my head going “BUT WHY DOES THEIRS WORK AND NOT MINE?!”

But I did what I did in Grade 10 when I started programming: I kept at it. I tried things, I talked to an LLM (okay that’s new…) and I eventually figured out every single bug. In 3 days I overcame dozens of obstacles and learned a TON. Mad respect to my team who do this as a living everyday, you all rock!

I. Love. Programming! I definitely lost the love over the years of working, but now that I don’t do it full time as my job, now that my survival doesn’t depend on it, I think it was really good that we reconnected. Thank you programming, you got me through the literally hardest years of my life, I would not be here without you.