Where does this idea of a lazy dev come from? Maybe we need to take a little detour and talk about me. I’m a Software engineer living in Montréal, Québec. As part of my hobbies I have a lot in a community garden, and grow my own vegetables, fruits and flowers.

One day I stumbled on a local gardening blog called Le Jardinier Paresseux, which could be translated to “The Lazy gardener”. That blog was maintained by Larry Hodgson, an horticulturist, whose philosophy was to be lazy in our gardens and let the nature do the work for us. Most often his advices were based on his own experience where by leveraging how nature works, he could do less work while still having a good production, and a flourishing garden.

I do believe this philosophy can be applied to a lot of domains, and even to Software development. But what does that mean exactly for Software development? There’s no Nature we can rely on. We only deal with computers and their silicon inert matter. What would that mean to be lazy? Should be lean back and not work anymore? Would that mean relying on AI to do everything?

Not really. The main quest is to create software that requires low maintenance and is easier to reason about. The worst thing that could happen to a developer is being paged at 3am only to be faced to a monstruous complex software system without any idea how to stop the current fire.

This mindset in place, we can relentlessly work towards simplification. Making sure our alerts are actionable, so a fogged mind can still do something when woke up at 3am. Run retrospectives on incidents so we can avoid similar issues next time. Nothing too revolutionnary. It has been written about a lot already. But yet this philosophy of being lazy is an appealing idea to me.

As for AI, you can read the ai page of this blog to know where I stand on that regard.

I hope you will be interested by the writing here, Internet stranger ;-).