As I ponder the pros and cons of going back to being an individual contributor (aka “Somebody who writes code”), a few things that I’ve found thought provoking are:

• The energy you get from building something yourself
• The power inherent in being an engineer
• Should managers write code ?
• What it means to be a senior engineer
• An attempt at reducing the “what job should I take ?” decision to an algorithm, as much as possible
• A paean to systems programming that induced uncontrollable laughter, and the desire to (re?)join the subset of programmers described in it.