“What did you work on today?”

"umm not sure hey"

I’ve always struggled with the “how was your day?” question.

This is because my approach to work is fairly scattered. While working on something, I’ll notice some UI that could be better, or realise a bug exists that hasn’t blown up yet, or have an idea for a whole other feature inspired by the current one I’m working on.

At that point there’s a decision to make - do I keep working on the thing I said I was going to do, or do I follow the new idea and see where the path leads? I usually choose the new path!

I imagine this drives everyone around me nuts. Sometimes it drives me nuts too. It’s not good to randomly deviate from idea to idea, always starting new things and never finishing things. To help keep focused, I’ve made up rules to stop myself from going too far down rabbit holes that won’t have big payoffs, and I’ve convinced myself that certain kinds of projects are a bad idea, partially because they’re too easy to get distracted on.

But the flip side is that there’s big value in being able to follow your nose a bit. By diving into a random detail that seems interesting or confusing, you learn a lot more about that thing and about the decisions that led to it being the way it is. You develop a lot more expertise on the domain you’re working in.

Over time you will grow your ability to see around corners. Today, if someone proposes a feature or shares some code pretty much anywhere in our codebase (not just the bits I wrote), I can pretty confidently say what will go wrong and what to watch out for. That’s because I’ve already explored in the same space they’re about to dive into.

All this makes it hard to answer the “what did you do at work today” question. Yesterday I found a bug that hasn’t caused a problem for anyone yet, but probably would be a big problem this time next year if we didn’t do anything about it. At the start of the day I had no idea this problem existed, and it wasn’t even in an area of the codebase I’d planned on working on. I just stumbled on it while testing something, and it didn’t feel right, so I kept digging. “What did you do at work today?” “I noodled around for hours on something that felt like it might be a bug” isn’t a very satisfying answer. (Now I have a whole essay to justify the answer…)

People use this meme template as if it’s a bad thing, but I find it very relatable and credit it with most of my strengths as a programmer.