On becoming a better developer (2015)
I respect Rich Hickey, but let me be a bit of a contrarian here. Feel free to hate on me:<p>First, try replacing &quot;developer&quot; with a &quot;production line worker&quot; from the article and see how that feels, because that&#x27;s what I feel &quot;development&quot; is turning into.<p>One of the most respected qualities of a programmer used to be &quot;creativity&quot;. This is not the case anymore. Nowadays developers are so focused on &quot;being seen as a good developer&quot; 
 than actually thinking about why they are a developer in the first place--to build cool stuff that can have huge impact. It&#x27;s understandable since &quot;being seen as a good developer&quot; is what makes you money.<p>The concept of &quot;developer&quot; is turning into nothing more than a production line worker. If you don&#x27;t believe me, just sit back and try to think of what tools you&#x27;re using to build apps.<p>Is it YOU who&#x27;s using the tools? Or is it the tools that are controlling you? You see this in all the &quot;cutting edge tools&quot; you must learn if you want to call yourself a good developer, such as webpack, react, grunt, gulp, npm, mocha, gradle, etc. etc. You spend most of your time learning these meta-technologies than actually building stuff.<p>These are great tools, but what they&#x27;re also doing is automating everything so there&#x27;s less room for creativity. Everybody builds apps the same way. Note that I&#x27;m not saying this is bad. I&#x27;m saying the &quot;developers&quot; are unknowingly becoming just a cog in the machine which can be replaced easily.<p>And I&#x27;m sure it WILL be replaceable because we are increasingly surrounding ourselves with these uniform ways of doing things. In the end there will be no room left for so called developers.<p>And when that day comes, it won&#x27;t be the &quot;better developer&quot; who will be worth a lot because all these techniques you learned will be replaceable with machines. You may think that&#x27;s some paranoid sci-fi stuff and you&#x27;re still making $120K a year so you&#x27;re just fine, but wait till you find yourself looking like a production line worker who get let go because machines are better at doing what you do. Let&#x27;s be honest, most programming nowadays is nothing more than plumbing together multiple modules written by other people. These abilities won&#x27;t be valuable in the future because they are totally replaceable with machines.<p>What truly matters is your ability to ideate and build something novel. Don&#x27;t just follow the herd and do what the famous people say or tweet online, because you will end up becoming the casualty.<p>I guess what I really wanted to say was &quot;don&#x27;t try to become a better developer, try to become a better creator&quot;, because otherwise you&#x27;ll be easily replaced in the future. It&#x27;s coming.