We had one ADSL connection coming into the office and three of us. I wanted to share the internet. Windows NT didn’t support it cleanly — it had a way, but it was clunky enough that no internet was arguably better. We’d paid hundreds of pounds for it.

I’d heard about Linux. Downloaded Red Hat, installed it, configured it for NAT. It worked — it was like magic. I’m pretty sure I had to recompile the kernel to get some bits working, but there were instructions and they were honest. It did what it said.

Here was software that was completely free — free enough that I could read the source code, make changes, run it however I wanted. It did more than the hundreds of pounds worth of garbage sitting on the desk. And once I set it up, I never had to restart it. Never. Compared to once a week on the NT box.

The difference, in my mind, was simple. Linux was built responsibly. NT was built as a money-making enterprise.

That held for a long time. I moved to Debian, then celebrated when Ubuntu arrived and made things more accessible. I’ve recently been able to abandon Windows altogether — gaming on Linux is finally viable. I came back full time and felt mostly at home.

But there were minor niggles. Things that felt slightly off but that I couldn’t quite name.

Then I started digging into systemd.

I remembered feeling odd about having to run specific commands to read logs. Odd about one tool doing many different things — which ran contrary to the Unix philosophy that had made Linux what it was. When I looked into the history of the opposition to systemd, it was revelatory.

systemd becoming process 1 is, in a word, irresponsible. It makes everything easier and more accessible, which is why it won. But unlike the Linux of old, the tradeoff isn’t visible upfront, and there’s no real choice. The responsible option isn’t the default anymore — it’s the thing you have to go looking for.

I thought I had already done the work. I thought I had found the alternative.

While I was celebrating Linux becoming mainstream, I hadn’t considered what it would cost.

The Linux ecosystem had started optimising for mainstream at the expense of responsibility. It works now, for far more people. But it’s a different thing than it was. When linux was really taking off, there was a joke going around (before memes were called memes) about Microsoft Linux. Turns out the joke was on us!

It is always a tradeoff between security and convenience — something convenient is rarely secure, and vice versa. I think something similar applies to responsibility. The more accessible you make something, the harder it becomes to hold the line on what it was built to do.

There was a time when software going wrong meant losing your work. Now it means losing your money, your reputation, or — in a car, in a hospital — your life.

The context has changed. The attitudes haven’t. And the places that once had better attitudes — the ones built on responsibility, on craft, on caring about the thing itself — are being pulled in the same direction. It gets everywhere.

Do you want your car running Windows? What about systemd?

Ring a bell?

I remember having mixed feelings when coding bootcamps were springing up everywhere. People were paying thousands to go on a six week bootcamp to learn how to code. I was happy that coding was becoming accessible, but I was not happy that people were picking this career path purely as a way of making money.

The same thing had happened in India - the popularity of software engineering had stemmed from the massive amounts of outsourcing that was happening. It was a lucrative career option. There was no love for the job, no curiosity about learning. It was a job.

Trying to hire a software engineer in 2021/2022 was an absolute nightmare. Salaries were skyrocketing and engineers were rare. Good engineers were rarer. The bootcamps were going hell for leather at this time, and then the layoffs hit. Tens of thousands of jobs lost, along with all the new graduates who entered the market. On top of that, add the promise of A.I being able to write code. It can probably write code as well as some of the bootcamp graduates.

There was a time that the majority of software was written by people who loved the work. It was treated more as a craft and we were all figuring out how to do it better. This craft then got commercialised, industrialised.

The focus is now on productivity, and how quickly we can get code out. The love of the work has been lost. Let A.I have that joyless (thankless) job! I (We?) don’t want it.

I’d rather be the last carpenter who still enjoys the job! What about you?

There is a quote by Mario Andretti:

If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.

This one clearly embodies the hare, but is it a good attitude to have in all work, or in general life?

We all seem to place so much emphasis on speed, it seems like we are trying race through life. Aren’t we all going to the same place?

I think the quote (of unclear origin)

If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together?

is a good comparison of our options, and while it might be nice(r) to go far, I think there is a lot more value in traveling together.

We are born alone, and we die alone. We do not have choice in those, but why do so many of us go alone, just to go fast?

Agile really shines here. In fact, it was agile that pointed out that the original estimates (which we thought was pessimistic) was actually still optimistic. The two weeks of user story mapping saved us a great deal of pain.

As Robert C. Martin puts it:

Planning can destroy hope… and show us just how screwed we are.

By constantly reassessing plans, Agile gives us an early warning system when things are slipping.

I used to think that the point of Agile was to be faster. The book Clean Agile argues that the point is to fail sooner.

In our case, Agile gave us an early warning system. It killed hope before hope killed the product.

Instead of going into overdrive and being a workaholic (again), we simplified scope, adjusted the deadline and found a better balance.

We like to think of this as the way of the tortoise.

How has Agile helped/impeded you and your team?