Bob Dylan or Steve Vai?
You see, they're both musicians at the highest level, but they come at it from very different sides. Bob Dylan can barely sing and his guitar playing is passable at best. But what he brings to the art is his understanding of the human condition. Suffering. Poetry. Emotion. And Steve, well Steve is one of the all time guitar Gods and what he brings to the art is technical mastery, fireworks, God level execution. Jaw dropping pyrotechnics from the fretboard. You get the picture.
And it's the same with programming. Some of us are obsessed with building. We see something missing in the world and we will it into existence. And some of us are obsessed with the source of this power. We hanker for more and more powerful intellectual weapons, sharper axes, better musical instruments.
Good music requires both kinds of people. So, whether you're a songwriter (product builder) or a virtuoso (technology specialist) - lean into it. Get good at it. If you're a builder - build, build more and more. If you're a specialist, go deep and then go deeper. And the deeper you go in your chosen field, the more you will appreciate the other. Because once you get good at one, you will find yourself limited by the other. When a composer can use their technique to fuel their imagination, that's when we get great music. And when players can compose we get the meeting of minds that is necessary for transcendence.
But that's for later in your career. For now, start where you are and go deep. Get good at your thing. The other will appear as a matter of course.
This week's featured job.
The fine folks at Druva are hiring a Principal Engineer. Druva makes storage solutions which means they make a file system in the cloud that handles Petabytes of data and their system is a huge distributed system that will exercise your skills not only in DistSys but also in filesystem theory and algorithms. The job is in Pune, which if you ask me, is the cherry on the top. Pune is where I spent my life till I was 21 and it is India's best kept secret - small enough to tool around in and have a social life, the best winters in India, plenty of sporting and cultural options and excellent trekking just an hour outside of town.
Check out the job here -> https://recruit.svs.io/jobs/aIOh_6I
You see, they're both musicians at the highest level, but they come at it from very different sides. Bob Dylan can barely sing and his guitar playing is passable at best. But what he brings to the art is his understanding of the human condition. Suffering. Poetry. Emotion. And Steve, well Steve is one of the all time guitar Gods and what he brings to the art is technical mastery, fireworks, God level execution. Jaw dropping pyrotechnics from the fretboard. You get the picture.
And it's the same with programming. Some of us are obsessed with building. We see something missing in the world and we will it into existence. And some of us are obsessed with the source of this power. We hanker for more and more powerful intellectual weapons, sharper axes, better musical instruments.
Good music requires both kinds of people. So, whether you're a songwriter (product builder) or a virtuoso (technology specialist) - lean into it. Get good at it. If you're a builder - build, build more and more. If you're a specialist, go deep and then go deeper. And the deeper you go in your chosen field, the more you will appreciate the other. Because once you get good at one, you will find yourself limited by the other. When a composer can use their technique to fuel their imagination, that's when we get great music. And when players can compose we get the meeting of minds that is necessary for transcendence.
But that's for later in your career. For now, start where you are and go deep. Get good at your thing. The other will appear as a matter of course.
This week's featured job.
The fine folks at Druva are hiring a Principal Engineer. Druva makes storage solutions which means they make a file system in the cloud that handles Petabytes of data and their system is a huge distributed system that will exercise your skills not only in DistSys but also in filesystem theory and algorithms. The job is in Pune, which if you ask me, is the cherry on the top. Pune is where I spent my life till I was 21 and it is India's best kept secret - small enough to tool around in and have a social life, the best winters in India, plenty of sporting and cultural options and excellent trekking just an hour outside of town.
Check out the job here -> https://recruit.svs.io/jobs/aIOh_6I