The Tar Pit — Ch. 1

Feb 1, 2026

Real life is messy. Hence the tar-pit. What are the joys and woes of the craft, and do the joys outweigh the woes?

Basically, programming is messy. Small teams can build fast, but building big takes exponentially more time and effort. And it might just be worth it.

The Joys of the Craft

• The sheer joy of making things. This is the imago Dei in us.
• The joy of becoming helpful to others.
• Fascination of complex systems interacting with each other in harmony
• The Joy of always learning. Autodidact.
• The delight of working in such a tractable medium. Comes with a cost.

The Woes of the Craft

• It demands perfection. A very un-human trait.
• Usually someone else sets the goals, the conditions, and funding. You don’t have the authority commensurate to your level of responsibility. Jobs where things get done never have formal authority commensurate with responsibility. Actual (vs formal) authority comes only after accomplishment.
• Always depending on other’s work, which is often poorly built.
• Designing and dreaming is fun; fixing seemingly tiny bugs is work. See “The War of Art” for more of this.
• The final bugs are the most difficult and time-consuming to solve.
• Your project may be obsolete by the time you are done with it.

The challenge and the mission are to find real solutions to real problems on actual schedules with available resources.

Do the joys outweigh the woes for you?