You are not the code

It was 2016. I was listening to Justin Bieber's Sorry (and probably so were you, don't judge), coding away at my keyboard in an office building in Canary Wharf, London.

We were a small team working on a complex internal tool for power users. Our tools were Clojure and ClojureScript, which we wielded with mastery and pride.

The great thing about building for advanced users is that they are as obsessive as you are about their own domain and will seize the edge wherever they can find it. So you build, they adopt early, you get feedback, and the cycle continues. It is a powerful feeling.

The platform we were building was meant to visualize and sift through tons of data, slicing and dicing it to make informed decisions quickly. We provided a few common views and predefined filters, designed by our invaluable Product Owner who used to do our users' job—he understood deeply what they needed.

One day, I got an idea. (The smartest and poorest decisions of my life both begin alike, as it turns out.) I wanted to craft a sharp knife and entrust the users with it. I was going to design a simple query language based on boolean algebra.

A week went by. Then another. Bieber on repeat, living in a continuous state of flow, my regular life put on hold. All I could think of was this language, and how powerful our most advanced users would feel using it.

After a couple of weeks, I was ready to demo the feature branch to Manish, my manager. At that point, he knew me well enough to know I hadn’t been doing what I was supposed to be doing, and that it was wiser to ask instead.

“What are you up to these days?”

Filled with pride, I told him I wanted to show him something cool. He smiled and grabbed a seat next to my desk. "Go on," he said.

He immediately noticed the new text field above the data display. I typed a complex boolean query, and voilà! The data I wanted was there, almost instantly.

Without stopping, I continued explaining all you could do with this powerful language. Users could save their own queries to use later. The interface was fairly self-discoverable, with syntax highlighting and readable errors explaining how the queries were meant to be written.

“This is very cool,” Manish said with a smile. Pride swelled in my chest.

“However… we are not going to ship it.” His demeanor turned more serious, with a hint of kindness.

I frowned and said incredulously, "What? Our users are power users. They deserve at least to try this! If they do not like it, we can roll it back."

“I get it. But this is not the direction we will take right now.” There was no malice in his voice, just kindness and empathy for how important this was to me. He did not put a hand on my shoulder, but I almost felt it.

In that moment, a rush of feelings overcame me. I sensed a fire starting to roar in my belly, one that could easily burn down the entire building.

But then, a sudden calm set in. I went to the terminal and slowly typed the command to delete my entire feature branch:

git branch -D feat/query-language

Then I hit enter and braced for grief.

But it never came. Instead, relief took its place. The code was gone, but I was still there. And with me were those two weeks of pure joy, focus, flow, learning, and growth. And new knowledge about building languages, too.

For the first time in my career, I understood all at once: I am not the code. The code is an artifact, a byproduct of an ongoing process. That ongoing process is my growth as a programmer, as an eternal student of everything, as a person.

I also understood that I had been carrying all the code I had ever written, petrified into my identity. If you questioned my code, you questioned me. If my code was broken, a part of me was broken too.

Just a few years earlier, that whole situation would have unfolded differently. But instead, a moment of lucidity and a simple terminal command taught me one of the most valuable lessons in my career.