I tell you true: when I look back on my career so far, I'm most proud of the work I did helping people climb that hill.
Most of the code I've written, even the best of it, is long gone. The company died, the system eventually got replaced, the business needs changed. I've debugged some epic problems through herculean efforts, but in retrospect most of those problems shouldn't have even existed; bad work process created bad results. I created some great system architectures, but technology advances so rapidly that the great solution of 10 years ago is now sadly out of date.
But getting some non-developer hooked on development? The shine on that doesn't wear off. Taking somebody who's struggling and helping them become a solid contributor? I'll always be proud of that.
Most of the code I've written, even the best of it, is long gone. The company died, the system eventually got replaced, the business needs changed. I've debugged some epic problems through herculean efforts, but in retrospect most of those problems shouldn't have even existed; bad work process created bad results. I created some great system architectures, but technology advances so rapidly that the great solution of 10 years ago is now sadly out of date.
But getting some non-developer hooked on development? The shine on that doesn't wear off. Taking somebody who's struggling and helping them become a solid contributor? I'll always be proud of that.