What's With All The Code?

As an IT Goon, I spend a lot of time working with code. While I personally enjoy it, I think it is important for anyone whose career is so dependent on computers to know to be comfortable writing code on a regular basis.

The idea of writing a short script to automate a common task should one of the first. Computers are great at doing the same thing over and over again. Personally, I don't like doing that, so I tend to reach for the text editor pretty quick. Being lazy has furthered my career more than any certification.

There's more to it than that, though. Ultimately, any application is not only the code that gets installed, it is the underlying environment as well. The OS version, the common libraries, installed libraries, and settings for all of that (IO, networking, security, et. al.) Not to mention dependencies among the applications themselves, where certain applications all need to be installed in the same OS instance.

Various containers have mitigated a lot of the problems, but these, too, have to be administered. The more you know about the overall application (app, OS, and their interaction), the easier this is. I'm frequently amazed at how much money is spent on pre-packaged solutions to solve simple problems. It usually gets sold as "it solves this problem, and so many more!" Except that we don't have those problems, and many of those have simple solutions.

Really, in many ways developers are customers. This doesn't mean they're always right, but it does mean that IT is there to serve them. The more we understand about these customers, the better service we can provide. In the IT role, this means not only understanding how to write code, but what is involved in writing code. At the same time, we build our own toolset to make our jobs easier.