Being a good developer isn’t about writing good code. It’s about making tools that improve people’s lives without compromising their rights, freedom, and safety.
@aral IDK. what if I'm writing effective, efficient software for a killer robot that can carry out extrajudicial assasinations? My code makes an excellent murderer, but I'm a bad developer?
@aral In an ideal world we'd do both. But today most in the industry do neither.
Even more dangerous are the devs out there that write technically good code to produce bad software... software that focuses primarily on false goals like scalability, centralisation / consolidation, monetisation.
Give me hobbyist's spaghetti code that doesn't scale past my PC over some super clever app from Big Tech that ties me to a corporate data centre and commoditises my data any day.
@pea I'm not passing judgement on you or anyone else making a living by programming. Heck, so do I. I think what @aral is not taking about being paid to code, and ultimately not even the license that code is available under. Google and Facebook build a lot of really shitty software by leveraging Free software tools and components after all.
Not all of us can easily chose the perfect way to make a living. The industry is shitty, not you.
@aral
This should be pinned, in my opinion.