Go Have Some Fun

When confronted with endless possibility, imaginative play is the appropriate response.

I have always been proud to be a software developer. I do hard things. I speak multiple languages. I work on the full-stack. I work at startups. I move fast. I hate wasting time in pointless meetings. Look at me. I am important.

What a bunch of fragile ego BS. Anthropic engineers are merging 30k PRs per day. I was in a meeting last week with a warehouse manager at a construction company in Ohio. He rebuilt their warehouse management software with a few prompts to ChatGPT. The next meeting a different manager showed off a platform he had built for tracking materials for commercial builds.

We can spend 90% of our time in meetings and still ship more than we have ever shipped before.

Building software is not prestigious anymore, it’s not difficult anymore. We can stop taking ourselves so seriously.

Now that we can cast off the weight of our own importance, we can finally have fun again. What a gift!

If you can imagine it, you can build it. Want your website to play like a text adventure game? Do it. Add some singing hamsters. Make a space ship you can fly around and blow up any website you want to, in 3D.

Play.

Make the experience of software joyful.

Don’t do it for attention. Don’t do it to make money. Don’t do it to be impressive. Do it because it is fun. Have fun doing it. Fun is enough of a reason to do anything.

Be ridiculous.

Be delightful.

Be extravagant.

We couldn’t before. There were deadlines to hit. There were points. There were stars. There was prestige.

Not anymore! Enjoy it!