What Daniel Boone Can Teach Us About Coding

Introduction

Daniel Boone was an American frontiersman who is commonly acredited for the exploration and settling of what is now Kentucky. I became fascinated with him after reading Boone:A Biography by Robert Morgan and The Long Hunters by Steve Rinella. He lead an incredible life filled with adventure, close calls, and tragedies - yet in spite of his adventures, he was commonly marked by an attitude of humility and deference to others.

After learning about Boone's life, I am inspired to live differently myself. I wanted to share some anecdotes from his life and extend those to being a better software developer. If you get anything from this article, it's that you should learn more about him. He was an incredible man and was lucky to live as long as he did.

Resilience

Like many men of his time, Boone made his living hunting deer and other animals and selling them for their hides. He would spend weeks, months, or even years in the woods living off the land and harvesting and processing deer to transport to sell to traders. One of (if not the biggest) risk of his lifestyle was not predators, weather, or illness, but other hunters.

Boone and his party members were accosted and robbed by other hunters multiple times throughout his life. These encounters often lead to the death of close friends, or on one trip, even his own brother. Even if nobody was killed, Boone's party would be robbed of hundreds or even thousands of pelts and set back by months. Yet he never let this deter him. Others would bail and turn back with their tails between their legs, heading home to try their hands at farming or other less profitable means for the time. But Boone would continue to grit his teeth and set himself to work to recoup his losses.

Software development can be prone to unexpected setbacks; a pipeline breaks after an update to an API; a stakeholder's requirements are altered, or a teammember leaves. Workloads increase. Deadlines shrink. Or you might even lose your job. But if you adopt the attitude of Boone and continue to work, day after day, line by line or module by module, you will regain your previous standing and become all the wiser and more resilient for it.

Resourcesfulness

Frontiersmen were required to be almost self-sufficient to survive. If their shoes broke, they crafted new ones. If the ran out of food, they hunted or gathered more. If they fell ill, they had to nurse themselves back to health. This always required optimization of resources and problem-solving to utilize tools that were perhaps originally intended for other purposes.

Us programmers often have to work with legacy code or unmaintained frameworks. The ability to make do with what's provided and extend old tools rather than wasting time rebuilding from scratch is essential.

Attention to Detail

One of my favorite anecdotes of Boone's life is about his childhood. As a prank, Boone and his friend filled his friend's father's musket with an excess of powder, expecting the kick to suprise the father and knock him back. To his horror, he learned that the musket was already filled and when fired it exploded and almost killed the man. Boone learned that for others and himself, attention to detail could be a matter of life and death.

Although attention to detail is not a matter of life and death in programming, a missing character can often lead to serious bugs - bugs that could mean lost data, leaked credentials, or worse. Thus it is crucial that programmers pay attention beyond just the focus and understanding necessary to make sure code compiles.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this post - I will try to write more often!

Colin