High Tactile Coding

I've worked on a lot of software over the past 25 years, mostly as a product manager but also as a developer (especially on data/analysis systems). One experience that I find highly under-rated is what I call "high tactile coding".

As product manager, I often think a lot about "the user" and "the business" and how to make the two sets of needs meet. Then I tell a developer what to build. I'm usually not using the software much myself (or if I am, it's only because I'm working on it--I don't really need it).

As a developer, I was often even further removed from the end-user of the software. Someone else is telling me what's needed, and I'm just making it work.

High tactile coding is totally different. I'm the user, the product manager, and the developer. Instead of long backlogs of curated feature requests, development specs, or tickets, I just...do what I do, like every day.

When something is broken or there's a change needed, it shows up because I'm trying to do something and it's clear that the software is lacking. Then I fix it, push the fix, and get back to focusing on my objective.

This process feels amazing. It's so responsive to my needs. It's so clear what needs to happen next. Everything happens so fast because there's zero debate or analysis paralysis. It's just "oh, I wish the logs could tell me X" so then I make the logs tell me that. Or "this API I'm using doesn't work the way it was documented". Okay, what's the work around? 1-day later, it's fixed.

It's such a high productivity mode to be working in. It doesn't scale, but it feels great.