Thread by @PaulDJohnston

There's a whole lot of people online saying they still look things up or make stupid mistakes when coding after X years in tech.

I definitely still do. I'm not perfect. Documentation is important. I look up stuff that is easy all the time. I make really dumb mistakes.

But I've also spent over 20 years coding in multiple different languages and doing various different roles.

I haven't always been someone that writes code.

Writing code is not what I do that adds value.

Someone who writes python or go day in and day out should remember a lot of python stuff because it'll become second nature.

But I wouldn't expect them to be able to walk into a board meeting and explain the product roadmap to an investor either.

I think our expectations of what constitutes "normal" in tech are wildly off. Languages change, new languages appear, practices shift, services appear and disappear, and we expect that we should be able to memorise everything?

I think the very definition of a good language is that you can easily find the simple stuff (that you have forgotten for the fourth time today) in the documentation.

And we all make stupid mistakes when coding because we're human.

But we're not in tech to be clever with tech. We're usually paid by someone to add value somewhere.

My value is often that I know something about strategy and startups and serverless stuff.

Coding comes further down on the list.

I sometimes feel like the football player-coach who used to be a player a few years back who has the experience. I can sometimes see a lot of the mistakes people make when playing the game, and can coach and direct. If I was pressed to play, I'd be shrewd and pragmatic, not fast.

Making coding mistakes is human.