Desire. Inquire. Goatmire.

Time to be a professional

What it means to do software development is expanding and changing. What it means to be a goddamn professional has not changed significantly. And the path to being a recognized and respected peer is still the same. The noise floor is way higher but very little has really changed.

As a professional we care about the tools but we should not be defined by them. I have my preferred editor, preferred LLM, preferred languages. Don't abandon these if you have reason to use them. Don't hold on to them when they don't serve you either.

There is nothing that serves a professional developer better than their network. Peers and other types of professionals, past colleagues that know your mettle, collaborators from open source, people you've taught or that have mentored you. This should be a personally valuable set of people and relationships but they are also enormous leverage for enabling you to do what you need to and a massive cushioning function when you struggle. This is where your next job is most likely to come from. This has never been more true.

Contribute to your space. Lots of degrees and I think a well-rounded professional does all of them to some extent.

• Pay dues that contribute to the commons. This is your paid Erlang Ecosystem Foundation membership. This is your union membership if that's applicable. It tends to be trivial money towards whatever your most relevant commons are. This is how we build a lot of value with a very small common effort.
• Steer your workplace towards contribution. Whether open-sourcing useful work and ideally sponsoring community events, foundations and so on.
• Teach, mentor and support. Offering the opportunities you had or wish had to the up and coming. This is your insurance policy against stagnation and a massive continuous injection of fresh blood for your network.
• Participate in events, physical and remote. Grow your interfacing surface area with other relevant professionals.
• Basic contributions of your craft to the commons. I'm talking about software development and we have this whole open source situation. You can and should contribute issues, PRs and help maintain stuff. Ideally on company time.

Participate in the professional spaces. The social medias spaces are largely just noise now but it is helpful to have people active there for a community or ecosystem. Then there are the Slacks, the Discords, the IRC channels, the forums. Activity in these spaces has value and if you never participate your are leaving a lot of potential on the table. 

Don't pollute the professional spaces. Be mindful about how and what you share. Slop-posting on LinkedIn is almost unnoticeable since LinkedIn was slop before the term was ever minted. However, it is still reflecting poorly on you and people will build up the association between you and the posting. So even in that hellscape a deft hand and some editorial thought is very useful and really heightens your signal over the noise. Now a well-crafted shitpost is totally appropriate in some professional spaces. Different matter entirely.

Find peers you enjoy exchanging with and nourish those relationships.

Be thoughtful in your speed vs quality trade-off. Always aspire to expose others to quality work. Keep the sloppiest things for yourself. Sometimes the quality is that there isn't a lot of text or code. You are making the thing tractable for the recipient.

The professional bits have almost nothing to do with code. Though they have everything to do with code. I don't care if you TDD, DDD, BDD or BDSM. But if your code always sucks or your PRs always hurt I'll struggle to recommend you to someone. There are a ton of methods people use, enjoy and even swear by. Cool.

The pillars of the professional ecosystems and communities I move in are people who consistently show up, play decently well with others and consistently put in (or out) work. This is also the only way I know to steer your destiny in terms of what you future work options look like. Maintaining bonds with the people sharing your interests.

Have a great weekend, thanks for reading.