Owning the whole thing

For the first few months of my job I thought my work ended at the edge of the screen. I built the layout, matched the design, fixed the bugs, and handed it over. Then I started asking what happened next. Who edits this page? Where does this form go? Why is this slow?

Every one of those questions pulled me one layer down, and I liked it there. The admin panel turned out to matter more than the landing page, because the people inside the company used it every day. The database schema decided what the interface could and couldn’t do. The deploy decided whether any of it reached anyone.

So now I describe what I do differently. I don’t build pages. I build the whole thing, and I am happiest when I can see all of it at once.

Thanks for reading. If this made you think of something, write to me.