All the Small Things: How mastering small things is the key to mastering big things
By: Daniel Villa
Tags: Career Advice, Software Engineering, Software Development

All the Small Things: How mastering small things is the key to mastering big things Daniel Villa Follow Nov 13 · 5 min read

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Gravity operates equally on the apple as the heavenly bodies. The same little force that nonchalantly plucks the apple to the ground is responsible for tethering together a star and a globe of billions of intelligent life forms. The force on the apple, however, was so small that it took these intelligent life forms a few millennia to even realize it was there. I believe gravity is a good analogy for how we should approach life, and of course, our engineering careers.

Accomplished Navy Seal and modern entrepreneur Jocko Willink touches on this idea with his saying: “Unmitigated excellence in every area.” So let’s explore the idea with some concrete code.

The CodeWars.com platform is built for devs to practice their skills and learn from each others solutions. I believe that we’ll find a popular but false understanding of what is excellent code. Of course, the authors of the code solutions probably wouldn’t make that claim, but it is what most community members are likely taking away from their experiences there.

There is a question on Code Wars which is as follows:

Write a function, which takes a non-negative integer (seconds) as input and returns the time in a human-readable format (HH:MM:SS)

Here is the top-most ranked JavaScript solution with the most votes in two categories: “Best Practices” and “Clever”.

Here is an alternative solution.

I believe the second is a “less popular” solution and is unlikely to get many votes. Perhaps because is obvious and therefore boring. It is not clever. However, Bob Martin author of Clean Code, and a few other seasoned veterans would tell you that this code is more of a “Best Practice” precisely because it is obvious and not to mention far more testable and maintainable. It took longer to write the second solution; it was the pursuit of excellence that produced it.

But let’s be real, if you took one look at my lawn you would wonder how a guy like that could write a thing like this. Ain’t to nobody got no time for that. However, this idea of excellence, like all good and true ideas, was not discovered in modernity. As early as the 18th century we find a quote like this: “whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.” The author goes on to include “even down to dancing and dress”.

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As engineers, solving the problem is part of our job, but not all of it. If you want career success; if you want to move planets; writing code is just the apple from the tree. We tend to think of admin tasks as not worth doing — certainly not “well” or “excellently”. Things like documentation, presentations to peers, unit tests, and refactoring take a side or back seat. As you level up your career the technically week co-worker or unpopular employee might might suffer the same treatment.

Two things we can draw from this quote: priority and what is “well”. Is it worth doing? I promise you there are things on your list right now that are simply not worth doing. Either because someone else can do it (it is not worth your time) or it is not in the top 3 things to do today or this week. If it is not in the top 3, remove it from your list. With your shortened list, are you convinced you can do them well? Or to borrow from Jocko’s language, excellently? In the case of engineering, and I suppose any other field, our point of reference is always the Pro and the Thought Leader. The Pro has actually build an enterprise system. The Thought Leader influenced the Pro and has built many systems themselves. Find these people and study them. For the record, unit tests and documentation are both worth doing and worth doing well. However, doing them well means applying them correctly. There are many books about that.

This idea of excellence goes even further back into the reaches of history and still has lessons to learn. In the Old Testament there is a passage that says “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might”. The lesson here is one of letting go and accepting what fate may bring us and committing to living well in the midst of circumstances we cannot control. How often do we find ourselves doing things we did not plan to do? Daily, at least.

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Ok, so you voted for NodeJs but the team chose Java. You have a choice. You can get your knickers in a bunch about it and become an anchor to the team, complaining, looking for everything opportunity of “I told you so”, and posting every single security article on the team chat. Or you can determine to be the best Java dev on the team. Imagine another scenario: You wind up as the dev lead on a team that you did not build and that you do not like. You can mope through the process like the living dead — yes, that is an option — or you can commit to being the best dev lead. You never know what you might learn about others, yourself, and soft skills you thought were not very important. We don’t know where our life will ultimately lead, but committing to doing all things well nearly guarantees success no matter what you find yourself doing.

I think at times we think too much of our plans. We construct a career path wherein we expect ourselves to do X and then Y, then building on Y we should reach Z in 1 year. Plans are good and needful. Plans are always wrong. The risk we run is that we overlook a seemingly useless situation because of what we think it means for us. Mentoring that struggling coworker is a perfect example. Or learning to work with difficult people. Mastering these difficult situations can perhaps launch you further in your career than you thought possible.

Back to gravity.

As the saying goes, any success a series of small success. Any good system is a series of small good parts. I would submit that any leader of great things has learned to lead himself or herself in tiny daily tasks and personal relationships. Like gravity, mastering the small things, like the falling of an apple, is the best way to learn how to prepare to take on moving entire worlds.

So, here’s to all the small things! 🍻