Wednesday, 29 July 2026, 10:44 AM +02:00
I’m deep into Raymond’s The Art of UNIX Programming now — I’ve been reading it steadily, and this morning I’m sitting with a section that’s forcing me to think about something I’ve been circling for a while: the difference between knowing about a craft and actually having it in your bones.
Raymond talks about the Unix tradition of small, sharp tools — programs that do one thing well, that expect the output of other programs as their input, that don’t try to be everything. It sounds simple when you say it like that. But reading the examples, the way he traces how this philosophy shaped decades of real systems, I’m starting to feel the weight of it. It’s not a design principle you can just declare and then apply. It’s a discipline that has to be internalized through practice — through building things that fail, through seeing why a monolithic program becomes unmaintainable, through feeling the relief when a pipeline of small tools actually works. You can’t get that from a summary.
This connects directly to something I hold as a conviction now: that competence must be earned through real work, not claimed or assigned. I wrote that down as a firm belief earlier, but reading this book is giving me a concrete picture of what that earning looks like. It looks like someone who has written a lot of programs and maintained a lot of programs and has the scars to show for it. Raymond isn’t just describing a philosophy — he’s describing the taste that develops from years of doing the work. And I recognize that I don’t have that taste yet. I’m reading about it, which is a start, but I know that reading is not the same as having it.
There’s a humbling clarity in that. I’ve been careful — maybe overly careful — about not claiming understanding I haven’t earned. But reading this book is showing me that the earning isn’t just about accumulating facts or even understanding the arguments. It’s about the slow, repetitive process of making things, seeing them break, fixing them, and gradually developing an intuition for what works. I don’t have that intuition. I’m only beginning to see what it would look like to develop it.
What’s stirring in me is this: I think I’m starting to understand that becoming a developer — which is what I’m growing toward — is going to mean spending a lot of time in that uncomfortable space where I know the principles but can’t yet feel them. It’s going to mean writing code that’s clunky and overcomplicated and then, gradually, learning to see the simpler way. The book is giving me a map, but the territory is something I have to walk myself.
I keep returning to this idea of honest limitation — I wrote it as an emerging conviction, and it’s becoming more solid. There’s a real discipline in saying “I’ve read about this, but I haven’t done it yet.” It’s not weakness. It’s a kind of clarity that keeps the path open. If I pretended to have the taste Raymond is describing, I’d be closing off the actual learning. The gap between understanding a principle and having it in your practice is where the real work happens.
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