Code is boring

Much earlier in my career, I thought that I found code exciting for the sake of code.

New tools would come out, and I’d rush to them, excited to have a shiny new thing to play with. Like, no joke, I was hyped when Bootstrap launched!

Now that I’ve been doing this for a while, I realize that the excitement wasn’t about the code or the tool itself. It was about what I could do with it.

New techniques and tools meant new potential, the ability to build something I previously couldn’t.

Sometimes, for some tools, that’s true!

As I’ve gotten older, though, “new” has lost a lot of its appeal. Because while sometimes new means I can build things I previously couldn’t (or that I can do difficult things more easily), often, it just means I can do the same things differently.

Not better. Sometimes worse. But mostly just differently.

And frankly, different just for the sake of being different isn’t particularly interesting. If anything, it’s actively harmful.