I’m not a musician, but I’ve always liked the idea of the étude. Per Wikipedia, “an étude is an instrumental musical composition, usually short, designed to provide practice material for perfecting a particular musical skill.”
As a manager in my current role, I don’t write code for work anymore, and TBH, a lot of the code that I have had to write for work (across multiple jobs over the years) hasn’t been intrinsically interesting in and of itself. Rather, it was a means to some larger end. That end was often quite useful or important, but the code, meh, it was whatever.
Thus, these days, I quite enjoy what can be termed a “code étude”, be it a practice problem or just some snippet to try out an idea. The key aspects seem to be:
- Starting from scratch, rather than just gluing other pieces together.
- Ending up as something interesting. Doesn’t even have to be “finished” or “work properly”, but what it becomes is illuminating or meaningful.
- Being relatively small, on the order of minutes or hours. One of the great miseries of modern code is how much substance/stuff (code, libraries, config, infrastructure, etc) is needed to get real-world things done, and this usually either a) takes a lot of time, or b) requires leveraging a lot of pre-existing code someone else wrote.
Anyways, thought I would share that.
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