TL;DR: Let’s invest in simplifying mundane things to enable us to deliver more valuable things.

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A god awful number of years ago, I remember doing chemistry im highschool and learning about something called a redox [1] reaction. I found it pretty cool at the time - but then break came around (some might now this as “recess”) and it was immediately forgotten (I was but a wee lad). Now a god awful amount of years later - I find myself thinking about the poetry of it. Especially as an engineer.

Redox Reactions

Redox stands for “Reduction and Oxidation”. This is more involved but the simple explanation is that - there are 2 things happening simultaneously, such that the overall quantity doesn’t change. A reduction in something with a simultaneous increase in another. The overall thing from the outside might look the same but there is an inherent change within the system and so, there is a completely different end effect.

Bringing it into Engineering

I’ve found immense success with this philosophy - albeit unintentionally. Reducing the cognitive load required to do mundane thing A which allows you to increase capacity to do valuable thing B. I feel like this is an important tool that we have that we rarely talk about.

Platform teams - at least good ones in my opinion - aim to reduce cognitive load required to implement shared or necessarily imperative capabilities so that domain teams can increase pace of feature delivery without compromising the entire system.

However, this doesn’t need to exclusively be a platform team function. It feels painfully obvious but I see engineers leaving these optimisations out of their day-to-day and it irks me.

Small things like docs - especially in the world of A.I.- is a silly example. You create documentation for a thing so that others in your team can get better context with their A.I. assistant. Or, you implement feature flags in a reusable way so that your ability to deploy becomes easier.

Or you build a library that takes care of mundane stuff - really invest in it - so that the next engineer is allowed to exclusively focus on the extraordinary.

The options now become endless and the usefulness apparent.

For me at least…

All these examples have a common theme. Invest in simplifying mundane things to enable you to deliver more valuable things.

References and Asides

[1] Not to be confused with Redux - which is a js library