[olowe]

Work may enable altruism outside of your actual job. For example, I got fulfillment from sharing my journey publishing some open source software over the course of a few months. Having savings helped make that possible.

SMART criteria[1] can help to get out of a rut. "Making the world a better place" is very difficult to satisfy. How many people? What is better? How much better? I don't advocate for quantising abstract ideas in general but sometimes the thought process of coming up with a number and hitting it helps to get going.

My current dayjob involves me wrangling a clunky Java system written like FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition[2]. Keeping this abomination running and getting paid for it feels soulless. Yet I genuinely believe I'm able to stick to my values.

For example, there are 3 components tightly coupled to proprietary AWS systems (AWS Lambda and Simple Queue Service). I feel this has made the world a (very slightly!) worse place; Amazon to me represents the bad side of humanity (greed, scrupulousness). Furthermore, people new to the software dev industry may never know that it's possible to implement these kinds of systems using significantly simpler, portable designs without making a deal with the devil! My goal is to refactor the system to instead use the language's built-in concurrency primitives to perform the same work.

The next person who sees the refactored work can more easily take it and run with it without needing to know anything about AWS. That person doesn't need to care either; I can always share this story with others who I don't work with. Maybe AWS does something so egregious that it's distasteful even to company executives; I can confidently say that we're not as tied to AWS as we think.

I'm not changing the entire world for all eternity. But in a way I am changing my little tiny insignificant slice of this world today in ways that I hope to inspire even just 1 other person in their own tiny insignificant slice :)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria [2]: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...