Member-only story

The 16-Hour Developer Workout

Pen Magnet
Level Up Coding
Published in
13 min readMay 31, 2020
Photo by Victor Freitas on Unsplash

In this business it takes time to be really good — and by that time, you’re obsolete.

- Cher

15 years ago, I was a contractor working for a Fortune 500 client. My colleague was in a role whose title always fascinated me: BuildMaster.

Nowadays no one hires a BuildMaster, nor do they appoint one. I miss those days. BuildMaster is an application, though.

BuildMaster often snapped out of his couch to rush to the office at midnight. “I have to double-click that damn build script — gotta bill an (overtime) hour, you see.”

One day, I advised him to automate it using some scheduler.

He answered, “If they know that this can be done using a scheduler, why will they keep me?”

Programmer’s paradox: In order to buy time for useful things, one must spend time in apparently useless and worthless things.

“Well, there is nothing stopping them from knowing it one day.” I reasoned. “You will be replaced, and blamed for not knowing such an easy thing.”

“I know, and I am prepping myself for that every day. But if I pull the plug today, who will pay for that seat I warm learning web development?”

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Written by Pen Magnet

Author of eBooks: Coding Interviews 2.0 & Comprehensive Approach to Senior Developer Interview, Startup writer, Programmer, Education Engagement Enthusiast

Responses (16)

What are your thoughts?

I really enjoyed this, as a recent grad I’ve been juggling several projects to try and illustrate my competences across the board (in the hope that it might lead to a job).
I push frequently to my GitHub account across several projects but of course…

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Hey there!
Good article! I appreciate the thought put into the creation of this workout routine 👏
My only feedback is that I think you could have reduced the length by half and still have passed all of the value ;)
Cheers!

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This is one of the best software engineering articles I’ve ever read on medium. Deep theory and actionable advice, bravo!

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