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It’s true. As I told someone recently: much of the job is going around to different engineers and asking “how can I personally make your job easier and more pleasant?” There’s a lot to enjoy about that.

The wrong way (which I’ve also done plenty of) is to ask a bunch of people about their problems, generalize them until they’re all a similar shape, and come up with a complex system that solves that general class of problem that everyone has in the abstract but no one has concretely.

The right way is to ask a single engineer what problems they have, and find the simplest solve for one that’s high leverage. Maybe it’s a script. Maybe it’s patching some existing tool that almost does the right thing. Maybe it’s just showing them how to use a tool and updating your docs.

And then you do it again. And again. And again. Eventually people will have similar-but-different problems and you’ll have to expand a tool‘s capabilities. Do that enough times and you’ll have a good shape for a tool that solves a class of problems in a way folks actually need.