Insignificant

Photo by David Marcu on Unsplash

Ever struggle with publishing that blog post or open source idea you have sitting around? But it feels too small? Too insignificant?

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It was almost 7 years ago, when the internet broke because a developer deleted their entire open source catalog from npm. The developer was upset because npm, a repository of open source projects, had sided with a lawyer in a trademark dispute. But some foundational projects, like Babel depended on that developer’s work. So when those dependencies vanished, foundational projects couldn't be built anymore, and new versions of your web site or app all came crashing down.

Many of us kept focusing on the question: should I depend on so many open source modules for the thing I'm building?

But what I think is more interesting is what this story teaches us about creativity.

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Recently, Google laid off about 12% of its workforce. What struck many developers about the Google layoff was when they saw an "L9" included. More than one person said: "I thought L9s were untouchable!" "I didn't think anyone could lay off an L9." "Even the CEO can't fire an L9."

But I just thought: what on earth is an L9?

L stands for level. There's only 10 levels. L9 is one of the highest, most distinguished developers working at Google. L9 developers are folks like Rob Pike, who invented the programming language Go and worked almost two decades at Google. He's elite. Christ, he's even worked for Penn & Teller. You can't fire Rob Pike. (Spoiler, Rob Pike wasn't the L9 let go. Rob retired a couple years ago.)

But Rob Pike is one of those developers that make many of us feel like we're never going to be a real developer. He makes me question: how am I ever going to contribute anything as interesting or important or useful as he has. Why should I put myself out there when my ideas are embarrassingly small compared to what Rob has done?

Why even try?

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A couple weeks ago, I recently helped start this blog for Census, the company I work for. And now, it's time to recruit more members from the Census engineering team to write blog posts or open source some of their code.

But I know what's going through some of their heads. It's gone through mine.

The code I wrote is too insignificant for something to publish for the crowd at Hacker News. The 400 word blog post about what I do at work is too obvious for anyone else to care about.

And then I think about that developer 7 years ago. The internet came tumbling down not because this developer had removed something as huge as Go from the universe. It was because the developer had deleted left-pad.

10 lines of code to pad the left side of a string with another character.

module.exports = leftpad;
function leftpad (str, len, ch) {
  str = String(str);
  var i = -1;
  if (!ch && ch !== 0) ch = ' ';
  len = len - str.length;
  while (++i < len) {
    str = ch + str;
  }
  return str;
}

That's it. That's what so many people depended on and many of us could have probably written ourselves.

Of course this makes me think about the dependencies my code has. But even more so it gets me out of my inferiority complex that I’m not an L9. It reminds me I could easily publish 10 lines of code I stuck in some junk drawer utility file so I didn't have to write it over and over again. Or share the 8 line database schema we use to store time series metrics. Or publish the silly questions we use to make our scrum meeting more fun.

It reminds me I shouldn't ignore the small ideas, because I don't have to be Rob Pike to have an incredible impact on the world.