https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-rime-of-the-ancient-maintainer/
“Every culture produces heroes that reflect its deepest anxieties. The Greeks,
terrified of both mortality and immortality, gave us Achilles. The Victorians,
haunted by social mobility, gave us the self-made industrialist. And Silicon
Valley, drunk on exponential curves and both terrified and entranced by endless
funding rounds, has given us the Hero Developer: a figure who ships features at
midnight, who “moves fast and breaks things,” who transforms whiteboard
scribbles into billion-dollar unicorns through sheer caffeinated will.
We celebrate this person constantly. They're on the front page of
TechCrunch
et al. They keynote conferences. Their GitHub contributions get screenshotted
and shared like saintly relics.
Meanwhile, an unsung developer is updating dependencies, patching security
vulnerabilities, and refactoring code that the Hero Developer wrote three years
ago before moving on to their next "zero to one" opportunity.
They will never be profiled in
Wired.
But they're doing something far more important than innovation.
They're preventing collapse.”
Via Christoph S.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
