I decided to retire in 2021 because, after such a long career, I had done enough, and it was time for something different. My art was much more interesting and challenging to me (and still is).

~ Andrew Wulf, from What I Miss And Don’t From Working As A Programmer

Interestingly, when people ask me “what do you do?” I used to say, with snark, “As little as possible.” These days? Still that, but now without the snark.

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Having to do everything turned out to be a real benefit later on, I was comfortable with such diverse things as communicating with customers, designing UI, identifying and tracking plans, architecture, and other non-programming tasks. With today’s roles unless you are in a startup environment (sometimes not even there) as a programmer you rarely get to do anything but write code. People even joke about programmers doing other things like designing.

~ Andrew Wulf from, How Many People Does It Take To Write Software

I certainly didn’t do anywhere near everything. (Notably, it doesn’t seem I got very good at communicating via the years of my early experience.) But I agree with the general sentiment. It’s all the peripheral stuff that I had to sort out, figure out, build, do, etc. which I think turned out to be the keys to my later — dare I say it — “success”.

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