I mentioned to a few people about taking a pledge to being a developer for life, and they mostly laughed at the idea. In our society, there is a high churn rate of developers morphing into business men, and can you blame them? There is real money on the other side, while developers are griping about monetization!
The likes of James Gosling, Linus Torvald, Andy Rubin and Sergey Brin all bring to mind people who I view as developers for life. There is a time to be a spaghetti coder/code monkey, and there is a time to engineer complex systems into one technically beautiful piece of software. With proper business acumen and deeply entrenched engineering knowledge, it is easy to see where technology is gravitating towards, and your skill set should put you in a great position to bridge the gap between the present and the future. No magic tricks involved.
There is a love, yep, LOVE for developing that I believe should be nurtured and never allowed to die, because I think it forms the base of the response to the inception question, “so how did we end up here?” This isn’t to say you should be the forerunner in all projects, but nurture the developer in you, regardless of where the wind blows you towards.
This post was partly influenced by the post from Chukwuemeka Afigbo about there being “No Old Bold Developers”. Personally my role model for this is Paul Houghton of Futurice, the Directory of Wizadry and Development who trained us during the Nokia Growth Academy.
Who wants to take the developer for life pledge with me?
Image credit: Intel
