TL;DR: (Just this paragraph is generated by ChatGPT - the rest is my shpeel) The author compares the journey of becoming a skilled software engineer to building igloos—practical, experience-based, and essential—and later, to crafting ice-sculptures—elegant, expressive, and technically intricate. After years of chasing deep technical mastery, they shift focus toward a more balanced and fulfilling growth path that values both competence and creativity, while embracing self-awareness, joy, and the human side of development.

---

When I was a “wee lad”, my parents came into a second-hand Children’s Encyclopedia set. Boy, I loved those. That book-set fuelled an obsession with reading that I have retained to this day. One of the things that I remember vividly from that was the Inuit [1] and the igloos they’d build. I found it so fascinating that one could build a shelter out of the very thing they were sheltering from - the snow.

Building Igloos

Building these magnificent structures requires a body of knowledge that would have to be learnt from experts and have to be perfected with years of experience, all to create an intuitive application of such complex geometries, material sciences, and practical knowledge that something as ephemeral as snow could be made into a structure that could hold the weight of a man on its roof and, despite being made of frozen water, can be warmed to 16C by body heat alone (in spite of outside temperatures being in the negative double digits).

I often think that software engineering can be a bit like this.

We struggle to articulate exactly what it is that makes a senior “senior” yet we can often quite easily spot one in a crowd of engineers. This always irked me to no end.

“How can I become that!? How do I get there!? Will I ever get there!? Is this the right path that I’m following!?”

For the longest time, these questions haunted me. I tried and tried and struggled to get to that point where I could intuitively navigate things just like my seniors at the time, who were all so good at these things and were so willing to, and did, teach me so much of the science behind it.

Then I got over it

“Fuck it” - I said.

If I do one day get there, great. In the meantime, I’ll aim to do something I have really good chops for— building ice sculptures. Of course, I’m not saying they’re objectively better than igloos, and I’m not saying I was naturally gifted at this. I’m just saying that I subjectively found it cooler and more appealing because I adore elegance and simplicity [2] and my natural inclination was towards more simplistic, methodical, and precise approaches.

So I went about learning all the fanciest things. I made it a personal goal to learn the inner mechanisms of what I deemed to be the most complex ways of doing things. I focused on acquiring deep knowledge of my craft and ways to gain more precision and optimisation. It paid off.

All this had led me to learn how to freeze my water correctly (scoping and solidifying my requirements), identify the right tools (frameworks, languages, design patterns) so that I can craft beautiful things (software that is elegant and functional) in a reproducible way. My experiments had met with success!

But for a while now, I’ve gotten over that too….

“Fuck it” - I said, yet again.

Building ice sculptures is tantamount to creating beauty, and I loved and always will continue to love doing that, but building igloos is so fundamental to survival and so elegant in its own way. I selfishly wanted to learn to do both.

So began a journey of self-doubt, self-awareness, self-acceptance, and, ultimately, a fundamentally different growth from the skills-hoovering I’d been doing for the number of years before this journey began. I’m in no way done with it - this chapter is still very much in progress - but I feel happier, freer, and more inclined to have fun. I’ve learned to both not take it seriously and be the most serious I’ve ever been.

Things have now clicked enough that “things clicking into place” doesn’t feel as exciting anymore. While this was scary at first - I’ve come to terms with it because I’ve realised that it opens up an entirely new world to explore. A world where one needs to gain skills that are more conducive to human-centred growth rather than skill-set-oriented growth. I must admit, this is not my forte, but that makes it so much more exciting for me.

Dear reader, my hope for you is simple - that you find/have found your journey as satisfying as mine is turning out to be.

References and Asides

[1] The books (being from the 90s) referred to them as “Eskimos,” but I’m aware that this is an offensive word, and so I use “Inuit” as a placeholder. No disrespect intended on my part.

[2] Who doesn’t, right? What a cliché.