The Sum of Your Habits
For Aristotle the meaning of everything was its usefulness in what role it had. The meaning of a knife is to cut well. Thus the meaning of life for people is what he calls eudaimonia. A complex term, a kind of flourishing or achieving one's full potential.
The aim in any professional life is thus to acquire excellence in what you do. A good doctor should help their patients gain health, a good tailor should make clothes people like and so on.
Two questions then arise.
What makes a software architect or a software engineer good?
Following the line of thought of Aristotle - being a better software architect or an engineer you must design and build better systems. π
What is a better system?
This touches on the fundamental value of digital engineering. Everything computer systems do, humans can do (although extremely slowly) as well.
Human time - the ultimate gauge of a software system
The way to judge a design of a system in its context or a piece of software in a scalar (being able to say this system is 3.5 times better than that one) and unambiguous way, which is also applicable to all systems is the time it takes for people to use and maintain that system over its lifetime. For all systems less maintenance is better and comes from good design for purpose and maintainable code base. The user time might take two ways of measurement. In systems that digitalize work processes less time spent is more value. However syatems that monetize human interaction or attention, say a video streaming service or a social network - more user time means a better system.
How do you become good at what you do?
βFor the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.β β Aristotle
So we practice our craft to become better. And to really excell we must build the right habits of practice.
βWe are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.β
β Aristotle
So make it a habit to learn new things about your craft and practice them.