Code has always been the easy part
When I joined Etsy the team was two years into a rewrite chasing a more elegant architecture (actually two distinct incompatible elegant architectures), and hadn’t shipped a customer facing feature in that time. I like to say (and it may even be true) that stopping and pivoting the team to standardizing on PHP was critical to unlocking everything that came later at Etsy. After all, no one ever has to argue about what elegant PHP looks like.
We’ve always had this tension. We’ve always fetishized the act of writing code, the quality of the code, the code as the primary artifact and IP. And on the other hand successful teams have always known that the value is the system, the value is human-technology hybrid that allows a product to be delivered, meet customer needs, evolve to provide more value over time, meet the spoken and unspoken needs of the problem domain, etc.

This essay is part of the Links collection. External articles with commentary. I share pieces that shape my thinking, with my thoughts on what makes them worth reading.

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