The Most Absurd Profession

Over the years, I spent a lot of time writing software for myself, or other people. The software I wrote falls into three categories:

1. Practice projects to help me learn or gain experience with a tool.
2. Projects used to facilitate the sale of another product (e-commerce or SaaS).
3. Projects where I make money by building the project itself.

The fate of projects

Many of my practice projects are on Github but most have never been seen by anyone other than me. When changing computers or distro hopping, I’ll usually end up losing some data if I forget to backup before formatting the drive. I have backups for important projects, but I don’t tend to backup these kind of toy projects. I often forgot that I actually worked with a specific tool for that reason. I remember I was learning the C programming language once, but today, I don’t remember much about C apart from basic strutures.

I ran two e-commerce businesses a few years ago where I build the online store myself using Django. When the businesses ended up failing, I shut down the online stores, and ended up losing the source code after one of the events I mentioned above occurred.

I also worked for clients where I was paid to write software where the software itself was the product. Many of these software ended up failing, and are nowhere to be found on the Internet today.

Absurdity

I realized how absurd all that is. You spend your waking hours building software, but there’s no guarantee that the code will live, or that you’ll even remember what you worked on.

Pilots are flying people to their destination safely. Doctors are saving lives. Meanwhile, my work as a programmer is vanishing into thin air and forgotten forever.

In a sense, it’s relieving because you know that there’s nothing to worry about, because it’s possible that none of what you’re doing will matter in any significant way.

But that doesn’t mean you should give up because that would be nihilistic in nature. Instead, I think about all the experience I acquired while building all the software that are now essentially useless. They might have been useless in a business sense, since they failed to generate revenue, but are infinitely valuable to me because thanks to the time I spent and everything I learned, I’m able to build any kind of software more easily today.

To paraphrase Mr Bernard Rieux, “Programming isn’t about building useful software, it’s about decency. In general, I can’t say, but in my case I know that it consists of doing my job.”

These days, I take pleasure in writing the best code I can, while fully acknowledging that it could be deleted at any minute, and that it will be useless to everyone including me, because that’s what decency means in this context.