Why “Without Cruft”?

January 12, 2019. That was the day I completed a non-fiction book entitled “Developer Hegemony“. Certainly another one on the list of new perspectives which change your day to day. The author Erik Diedrich flips the corporate world on its head and unleashes 400 pages of impending, even inevitable doom. It does this pointedly and unequivocally to establish a new way of life and work for a standard employed Software Developer.

I read a book…

Reading the Developer Hegemony bends the corporate space-time continuum. Seriously, the book has helped me see view large corporations as a product of history, using programmers as assembly line workers. But, the reality is as programmers, we cross-examine, dream about, and enhance mammoth-like tasks into dismissible minutiae that anyone can do. Once the team I worked with made daily settings changes which took a specialized tech support guy to search through 30k lines of data, then make a single character change, hand it off to another even more generously specialized software developer who then takes 4+ hours to release it on a website. Then all cruft was removed by a programmer.

When all said and done, this setting change can be done by anyone without little or no knowledge to click a checkmark and a save button. Voila! That’s some serious efficiency. What is that, like 4 hours to 1 second? 60 minutes per hour is 240 minutes. Then times that by 60 seconds a minute… 14400 seconds. Ok, so in other words, if the 2 support guys made $50/hour, that task routinely cost the company $400!! That just saved the company 1000s of $$$ monthly, let alone yearly.

Another one. One support guy (one because no one else knew the process) used to spend 6-8 hours every 3 weeks releasing code to production. Ok, that’s $300-$400 gone for the company for guys doing support to stop doing support and act as a software release team. How’s it look today? Now it’s down to the click of a button for someone with little to no knowledge.

Programmers are basically doctors of efficiency. This is no joke. Software Developers are constantly solving problems of inefficiency. Every time a variable (in layman’s terms, a word) is used 1 too many times, we have this constantly nagging goal in life to just remove it (aka refactor). Why is that? Because we thrive on efficiency. See, a doctor examines your body and often guesses at how to make it more healthy, or efficient. Stop eating this food, start taking this medicine, start exercising, etc.

What does this have to do with programming and doctors? Well, a programmer looks at your work and knows you’re spending way too much time using paper, saving huge Excel spreadsheets, or typing the same identical email several times a day. Even typing a few extra characters regularly twice a day can be annoyingly inefficient to a developer. So, in other words, a programmer can take anything repetitive, remove all cruft, and leave you with the absolute minimum work necessary.

Go be a doctor programmer. After having all these realizations from reading the “efficiencer” sections of Erik’s book, I had glorious new revelations of doing “consulting” jobs for businesses, small and large. I had new prospects of helping others remove the burden of Excel spreadsheet migraines and complete-anarchist-like-behavior of unorganized rioting document files scattered between universes. With that being said, it’s one thing to work constantly on something and working now while benefiting later. In other words, simply teaching others to be more efficient.

Passive income sounds nice

Starting a blog has been a background idea of mine around the time I built my first website for a company. The issue is that I never had a topic that I felt I had enough experience in. I had ideas, thoughts, even a couple book ideas. But never something motivating enough to go and actually start writing. That is until now. I realized that I love to learn. But I specifically love to learn about how to make learning more efficient. Like, say getting pretty decent at basketball, or playing piano more than practicing piano.

There are dozens of amazing books out there offering insight in learning various skills or hobbies. These books very often come from domain experts. But that’s the issue. These experts often don’t know about each other. There’s no one who acts as a glue to bring them all together. I want to help you tap into these super-human-like natural abilities that we all have. I want to help you find the ability to do what you may feel intimidated by. To do it with complete optimization and knowledge that you can do it. This blog is that means.

In time, I expect that writing on these topics of optimized learning, problem solving, all-around efficiency will lead me to do more than write a few random blog posts. Keep an eye out for other media which makes it way via this blog: online courses, books, who knows what else! Teaching is certainly on the path as well. But, we’ll get there in time. For now, this blog is what I will use to eke out the ideas and formulate some concrete palpable material.

I plan on covering some other very interesting books in the near future. If you’re interested, take a look at my goodreads list of read books. You may find some surprisingly interesting ones there. here...

Check out my blog here: https://withoutcruft.wordpress.com/2019/01/13/why-without-cruft/