This article is part of a series about Zsh:

There are many boring tasks we repeat day after day: creating, copying, moving or searching files, launching again and again the same tools, docker containers, and whatnot.

“I’m trying to go down a bottomless pit. I’ll never make it till the end.”

That’s what I thought when I tried to create my own video game. I was young, beautiful, and I was struggling to use for loops and arrays at the same time. There was so much to learn!

Fortunately, I found the strength to continue. More and more, the concepts behind programming began to make sense. From there, learning wasn’t a chore anymore, but an intrepid journey. Going through a book about C and trying to create my own adventure on MS-DOS was a crazy Indiana Jone’s-like discovery I’ll never forget.

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”. More exotic terms might be used too, depending on the creativity of your management.

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. We should first create two interfaces, put two decorators here and maybe three factories there; we need the system to be flexible as much as we can, the client expect to keep his backend for 20 years. How, and what about abstracting this? It might not be DRY enough though.”