Bad news: you’re in the meeting room. You’re listening to your team leader while she’s proposing the solution she had in mind for the next feature or the product you’re working on. Dave, your colleague developer, will have to implement it. “Great solution! Pretty easy to implement!”, he suddenly claims. “I only need to change two fields in the database, modify two or three existing features, plug everything back together, and that’s all!

Similarly to the nobility in the Middle-Age - who loved enslaving poor villagers to make lords and knights rich and powerful - we, as software developers, love titles. A glimpse at them and you’ll see exactly what the developers skills are, and how much value they bring to the world. We don’t have lords, kings, and buffoons in our little Software Development World, but we have titles like “coder”, “programmer”, “developer”, “web developer”, “front end developer”, “software developer”, “software developer engineer”, “devops”, “architect”, and even “consultant”.

Once upon a time, in the Fabulous Land of Web Shops Where Rivers Were Made of Honey, there was me, fresh and young PHP developer with little experience, and my team leader who was in the industry for 10 years. It was late in the evening, and I was still at the office. We had to finish a backend for an important client. Quickly, as always. I was exhausted. My team leader was full of passion, agitating a weird diagram full of boxes and arrows: “Here’s my idea.

You thought that having icons everywhere on your desktop with a beautiful start menu was the better and only way to interact with your computer? Many Linux distributions, and many Operating Systems (OS) in general, like Windows or macOS, have their own desktop environment. It’s basically a set of icons, windows, toolbars, widgets, wallpaper and other functionalities which give to the users “easy” ways to do what they want. These desktops are meant to be used by everybody.

I heard many developers having strong opinions about burnout. Something like: “I’m not the kind of person to burnout! I know how to manage my stress. I know how to manage challenges. I’m in the control of my life.”. Only the others are victim of burnout until it hit you. I experienced a severe form of burnout at the beginning of my career, as I was mentioning in this article about stress.