Three decades of Execution Over Dogma

Opinions Come and Go

I entered tech in the dial-up era and have watched countless "one true way" crusades rise and fade. IDEs versus plain editors, Vim against Emacs, Linux versus macOS, the battleground shifts, but the fervor stays the same. Most of it is noise generated by insecurity or the assumption that what worked for me must work for everyone.

"No one went back to encyclopedias after Google arrived." was a lesson for me in irreversible progress.

I had a Self-Taught Start, Then Formal Studies. For my first decade I learned to code on my own, writing Perl on *nix while a kid and took a break to go blow stuff up in Iraq as a Marine. Mid-career I earned a CS degree at night. The credential opened some doors, but the bigger gain was a structured mental model of concepts I already hacked together. Each path had value; neither guarantees mastery.

I survived the Tool Wars, moved from Perl to Ruby and then I built back-end systems in Node.js in 2013-2014 and caught flak from "serious" Java shops. Today TypeScript runs everywhere from cloud functions to spacecraft. I spent ten years a proud Linux die-hard, then swapped to macOS for iOS development only to watch the industry swing back toward Linux containers on Apple Silicon. The lesson: tools are transient; your ability to adapt is permanent.

The Only Metric That Matters

Projects live or die on execution. Can you take an idea, turn it into running code, and ship it to users? Whether you do that with GPT-4o, a vintage Emacs config, or hand-optimized assembly is secondary. Deliver value consistently and the argument about how dissolves.

LLMs Are the New Normal and to some though it may feel like cheating, much like Stack Overflow once did. I've shipped production services with model assistance since before tools like Cursor existed. Juniors who pair curiosity with LLMs will learn faster than any previous generation. Treat them as accelerators, not crutches.

So what are the Practical Takeaways

• Measure output, not method. Shipping beats stylistic purity.
• Stay tool-agnostic. Master fundamentals so you can swap parts guilt-free.
• Invest in learning loops. Degrees, bootcamps, self-study—pick what closes your gaps fastest.
• Use automation aggressively. From CI pipelines to AI coding aids, free your brain for higher-level design.

The industry will keep debating what makes a "real" engineer. Ignore the clamor and focus on results. Thirty years in, my scorecard is simple: Did we ship? If the answer is yes, you're winning.