Developer's daemons
(This post is also available in Italian, change the language in the top-right corner to read it / Questo post è disponibile anche in Italiano, cambia la lingua in alto a destra per leggerlo)
The Two Daemons of the Developer
Every developer lives with two inner daemons.
And if you catch the pun, you’re probably a developer or at least a bit of a nerd: in operating systems, those invisible background processes that keep everything running are called daemons.
The Daemon of Pride
The first daemon shows up the moment we write our first working program.
A “Hello World”, a shape on the screen, or maybe a tiny script that makes a boring task easier.
That’s when it hits us: “I can give orders to a machine, and it will actually do what I say”.
It’s a small rush of power that stays with most developers for the rest of their career.
From then on, the urge to bend reality with code never really goes away. It just keeps running in the background like a daemon you can’t kill.
The Daemon of Laziness
The second daemon is laziness, and here it’s not a bad thing.
We’re not talking about doing nothing, but about finding smarter ways to avoid doing the same thing twice. It’s laziness turned into creativity.
Picture a tiny hunter clan tens of thousands of years ago.
In our clan, there are three hunters:
- Urok doesn’t hunt, does nothing, and starves.
- Grag wrestles wild boars with his bare hands and eventually gets killed.
- Lem, not a big fan of hunting, builds a bow and arrows to make life easier.
Who survives and thrives? Lem, because he turns laziness into ingenuity.
Fast forward a few millennia, and the same principle gave us computers: someone was tired of doing math by hand and built machines to do it instead.
Productive Laziness and Creative Pride
For a developer, laziness is never the goal. It’s more of a mindset: instead of asking “how do I get this done quickly?”, the real question is “how do I make sure I never have to do this again?”.
That’s how tools and best practices are born:
- a script that takes care of repetitive work;
- a library you can reuse in project after project;
- a configurable system that adapts itself instead of needing endless tweaks.
Sure, it usually takes more effort up front than just doing the task a couple of times by hand. But in the long run, it saves hours, days, even months of work. That’s laziness as an investment.
Pride plays its part too: it’s the belief that things can always be improved, that “good enough” isn’t actually good enough. It’s the little voice that pushes you to make your code cleaner, more elegant, and more useful to others.
When these two daemons work together, the result is magic: laziness keeps waste in check, pride pushes for quality. The outcome is stronger, more reliable software – and ironically, less repetitive effort.
Two Daemons Always Running
These two daemons never really stop. They’re like system daemons: always running, using up a bit of energy, but without them nothing would work.
Every developer feels this tension:
- laziness whispering “find a way to stop doing this boring thing over and over”;
- pride saying “you can build something better, bigger, smarter”.
When the balance tips too far, the results aren’t great:
- too much pride leads to over-engineered monsters that no one can use;
- too much laziness creates flimsy shortcuts that fall apart under real use.
But when the two daemons are in sync, that’s when developers do their best work:
a kind of productive idleness, where the point isn’t to dodge work but to make it smarter, more human, maybe even more fun.
It is in that balance that the true art of development flourishes.