This week I've been working on a change to our infrastructure & deployment. Cosplaying as an SRE for the week.
My work has been editing a bunch of docker, yaml, and terraform files trying to get things to line up just right. It's a bunch of small tweaks, failed CI jobs, & many repetitions of building containers. Sure, it's annoying. But I'm also finding a certain joy in embracing the slog.
Nobody writes infrastructure configuration & gets it perfectly right on the first try. There's always a long tail of small tweaks to get it working. Impatience is futile. It takes the time it takes.
Rather than being a problem, there's a certain comfort in knowing that I'm doing a difficult job in a complex system. It seems to me that this approach applies in a lot of software development. Most of the time, a software developers face uncertainty & the slog of understanding & making changes to a complex system. That's the job!
It's honest work, slogging.
There's nothing wrong with feeling like your work is a slog. And what seems easy for another developer was probably a slog for them; you just didn't see the hours of wrong attempts before finding the right solution.