97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know

Chapter 64. Your Greatest Products Are Not the Applications and Services You Produce

Ryan Bell

Director of Creative Energy at Vim Labs

This may come as a shock if you’ve been in the industry for a long time, having learned to keep your head down and assume the role of a productive software developer, but you are not solely in the business of delivering applications and services. Software developers indeed develop software, but I believe that it is as imprecise a description of the nature of your true role as it would be for a musician to describe their calling as delivering etched vinyl and audio encodings to record labels. Applications and services are your media. They’re a packaging layer that encases a greater offering you can extend out to the world. You are in the business of delivering uninterrupted Magic Moments, one after the next.

That first time you played Super Mario Bros. with your friends around a Nintendo Entertainment System and stumbled across a Fire Flower power-up—that was a Magic Moment. Soon after acquiring this new superpower, you were no longer pushing buttons on a square controller; you were joyously tossing fireballs across the screen like a boss, experiencing this magic uninterrupted. Now, remember that before that moment, your character was just an ordinary plumber navigating drainage pipes in an 8-bit world. There is a tremendous difference in mindset ...