The Software Developers Home Lab
This post caught my eye: Why you need a home lab to keep your job.
What intrigued me, as a web developer, was not setting up servers with the latest and greatest hardware. It was the question of what exactly the ‘Home Lab’ looks like for a web developer. I have a number of things cooking in my home lab but I’m thinking I really should have more. These are non-paying projects, built for fun or necessity or just to develop my skills with tools I don’t use at work. Here’s a rundown of a couple of them:
- My wife’s website. Wordpress for most, Django for gift certificates. Nginx on EC2.
- This blog: Jekyll static site hosted on github
- My scrapbook: home-brew static site generator in python, hosted on S3
- A little Node app for sharing / publishing lists of links. (also on EC2, but no link at the moment :)
There are a number of notable omissions from this list, and the reason I’ve omitted them is important (to me, anyway).
First, I didn’t include the many throwaway projects on github or the ones littering my hard drive. Second, I didn’t include the tools I use, or the substantial time commitment that’s involved in learning new tools and frameworks.
The reason I think it’s important is that there is a certain pathology that can become nearly all-consuming when working in this field. The pathology is an obsession with methodologies, tools and frameworks at the expense of code that can ship.
Code that can ship.
Flamewars about code editors, MVC, TDD, IDE’s or security mean very little in comparison with deliverables. Refactoring and obsessively polishing are equivalent to premature optimization. One person using your code will educate you just as much, or more, than reading 1000 posts on hacker news.
No matter what you’re interests are, whether it be writing, music, art, photography, social work or accounting, your primary focus should always be on your deliverables. Put your work in public. It has never been easier.
If your interest is code, get some out in public. When your code is out in public, it represents a committment. The academic debates and hypothetical questions go out the window and you experience the rubber meeting the road. So, if you’re not already doing it:
If you’re just getting into the field, you don’t need permission or someone to tell you how and what needs to be done. If you already work in the field, your clients and/or boss doesn’t want to pay for theoretical or untested solutions. You need to invest in your own education and future and show results before they will be convinced.