Many of today’s programmers—excuse me, software engineers—consider themselves “creatives.” Artists of a sort. They are given to ostentatious personal websites with cleverly hidden Easter eggs and parallax scrolling; they confer upon themselves multihyphenate job titles (“ex-Amazon-engineer-investor-author”) and crowd their laptops with identity-signaling vinyl stickers. Some regard themselves as literary sophisticates. Consider the references smashed into certain product names: Apache Kafka, ScyllaDB, Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
Much of that, I admit, applies to me. The difference is I’m a tad short on talents to hyphenate, and my toy projects—with names like “Nabokov” (I know, I know)—are better off staying on my laptop. I entered this world pretty much the moment software engineering
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