It's All About Attention
No. This is not a blog post about AI. However, this title could be easily confused with a famous AI paper about transformers, Attention is All You Need ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 ). Perhaps the machines know something we dont. In all seriousness, attention or focus is really a prerequisite for engineers. In order to understand complex tasks, make sense of complicated systems full of technical debt and anti-patterns, and reason on vague Jira tickets, engineers need focus. Without focus, basically, it's impossible to do engineering. Time drags you down, and what should be 1-2 days turns into weeks or even months. It's possible to get things done without really understanding what's going on. Software is about layers and layers of abstraction; nobody understands all the things in the universe. However, engineers think it's fine to move forward without solid foundations, and that's a huge mistake. IMHO, it's an attention issue. Imagine you are driving, you d...