You usually hear it in the context of someone who's had a long enough career to forget how hard "just writing code" is when you're a noob ;)
I suffer a lot from procrastination and I think one of the reasons is that I find it still a hard to write code. Which most of the time is not coding but reading and trying to understand code. And thinking about all the alternative ways to solve a problem. I often find myself struggling to commit my changes doubting whether my changes are good.
I also still find myself looking up the order of the parameters of standard C library functions that I have used over 30 years. I am dyslectic and struggle to remember facts. I also still find myself making stupid Boolean logic coding errors and make one-off mistakes. I still find myself stepping through loops with the debugger just to see if I did not make a stupid mistake.
It still often takes me more time to solve an issue than I had thought it would take me. There are days when I leave the office feeling that I have accomplished nothing because I have not committed any working code.
If it helps, we're at the dawn of AI assisted development. That will take a lot of the cognitive burden, allowing us to focus on the "what" more than the "how"
I predict AI assisted archicture design will come soon
Perhaps there is an opportunity for a more natural language approach to infrastructure as code, but I am not sure how far you can take that since the reality is still a lot of arbitrary delcarations.
Can't you include comments in your code?
Some stuff, like which CIDRs are necessary for which connection, are only obvious in the moment you write it, not 1 or 2 years later or for another person who joins your project next week.
"Hey, just spin up a server with enough capacity, alright?" Yes, sure. Please define capacity.
Those definitions are usually in the docs, which is why the code makes so many references to the docs.
Many infra-as-code systems allow you to add comments to the docs, which (if done well) can really help.
And infra-as-code is much superior to infra-as-let's-click-on-the-gui-until-it-works' Yes, it is hard to read (I know, I do it for a living). But at least you have a document which describes the infra!
“It is very difficult to talk of the operations of the mind with perfect propriety and exactness; because common language has seldom made any very nice distinctions among them, but has generally call’d by the same term all such as nearly resemble each other. And as this is a source almost inevitable of obscurity and confusion in the author; so it may frequently give rise to doubts and objections in the reader, which otherwise he wou’d never have dream’d of.”
––A Treatise of Human Nature, by David Hume, pg. 76
Also this is why I love automation, like scripts for everything. It's like a memo to your future self, with the side benefit of sparing you menial work. I keep even single one liner commands as their own shell scripts with a descriptive name.
Try to read and understand everything your write. If it doesn't click immediately or needs too much outside context or "working memory", make it simpler. Failing that, elaborate in comments.
This is exactly the thinking I see people trapped in and was pointing out. Focused on solving the engineering problems, not the humans that come before and after the problem (both end users and developers). We know there are hard things in engineering and problem solving ain’t easy. I think in an absolute sense you are right, but in a practical sense, it is more than a desirable side effect. Code once written and solving a problem can live on for a very ling time.
Unconscious incompetent - you don’t even know how much you don’t know
Consciously incompetent - you have a rough idea of how much you still have to learn
Consciously competent - with willpower and effort you are competent at your job
Unconsciously competent - you are competent at writing code without effort or even thinking about it
Senior engineers (good ones) become unconsciously competent, and forget how difficult it is to write good code - because it’s now automatic!
I've worked a few times with people I thought were just leadership jockeys their whole career, and then it turns out they were actually software developers for 20 years prior to that. They had all pretty much washed their hands of software, and their attitude was "Well, what would I know now. Not really my scene anymore.". That's a lot of experience thrown out the window.
I spend more time on thesaurus and dictionary sites than I did/do on places like planetsourcecode and stackoverflow.
The thing I see even more with seasoned programmers over time is conscious incompetence. We all start as unconscious incompetence, we all have no idea how much there is to learn, and people tend to assume that you can learn most of what is known in a career or lifetime. Then you learn a lot and grow older, and you find out that the visible bounds of what you don’t know grows much, much faster than the bounds of what you do know. The more you learn and the more you practice, the more you discover how very little you know. (BTW I first heard this from a retiring geophysicist, and have just noticed that it fits every great programmer I’ve worked with, as well as my own experience.)
Bloody shocking just how many layers of concepts, frame works, Etc there is.
Or step away from JavaScript world for a couple of years. About the same sensation.
A problem that one will only properly learn about by communicating with other humans, understanding their expectations, skillset and most relevant, what their business domain is all about.
All tech is magic until you pull the curtain...