Dogs & Demons

This weekend, I found myself at a local, Japanese-and-Ainu-culture event. Nothing big or crazy, just a small event in a charming, old-style Japanese home, located on the semi-outskirts of Sapporo.

The event had a mixture of live music, live calligraphy, workshops teaching how to do Ainu-inspired embroidery, food, and an exhibition about upcycling kimonos into contemporary fashion¹.

Just to be clear - as much as I'd love to paint myself as a man of culture, I was mainly there due to my friend being a co-organizer, and another friend playing the piano there as the 2nd musical act of the day. If they hadn't invited me along, it's more or less guaranteed that the most cultural thing I would have done that day, would be rewatching "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia", in the comfort of my home. But touching grass is important, supporting your friends is important, and so is varying the types of culture you ingest².

While watching a combined music and calligraphy performance, watching the calligrapher work suddenly reminded me of my favourite calligraphy plaque³. It's a plaque I've never actually seen, neither in person, nor in photographs. I only know about it, due to a passage towards the tail-end of Alex Kerr's brilliant book "Lost Japan - Last Glimpse of Beautiful Japan." I could go on extensively about how much I recommend this book, but the bit that always stuck with me the most, was this:

"Shirazu Masako has in her study a tanzaku calligraphy plaque which reads, 'Dogs and horses are difficult; demons and fascinating things are easy'. The idea is that painting dogs and horses is difficult because they are so ordinary; demons and grotesque objects, on the other hand, are quite easily depicted".

— Alex Kerr, "Lost Japan - Last Glimpse of Beautiful Japan."

Mr. Kerr would later go on to write a book named "Dogs & Demons", so evidently he found himself drawing even more meaning from the plaque than me. I hope nobody takes any offense from me shamelessly "borrowing" the title for this little ramble - it's meant as nothing but an homage to both the brilliant original plaque text, and the equally brilliant writings of Alex Kerr.

As I stood there, listening to the shamizen and singing from the musicians, admiring the craftsmanship and elegant urgency of the calligrapher, I found myself thinking about the dogs and demons of my daily life, and of the rapidly developing world at large.

The "Dogs & Demons" of My Daily Life

The first places my thoughts wandered off to in search of equal parts canines and ghouls, were to some of my main hobbies: Brewing coffee, and baking bread.

Bread

In the world of bread-making, there are so many fun ways to differentiate and vary your bread. It would be impossible to list even a fraction of them here. Varying flours, ratios, dough methods, baking methods, shaping techniques, fermentation approaches, leavenings, fillings - the list goes on.

But I'd dare make the claim that they might almost all be "demons". I'm already slightly regretting doing bread as the first set of examples, because there's some major overlap in the dogs and demons of this hobby, but bear with me for a second here.

I think that the "dogs", i.e. the fundamentals to master to make your "demons" stand out in bread, are mainly the art of shaping, gluten-development, and understanding dough fermentation. Now especially that last one is a huge undertaking, that I'm barely scratching the surface of. But once you reach a baseline understanding of those disciplines, you will be well on your way to make brilliant bread, almost no matter which way you choose to go about it, and no matter which "demons" you add to it.

Now the only question that remains is whether sourdough is a dog or a demon - I'll let y'all wrestle with that conundrum on your own time.

Coffee

The world of coffee runs abundant with demons. Funky bean processes and fermentations, elaborate equipment lineups, brew recipes that read like alchemic rituals, filter types, latte art, and the seemingly unending amount of serving methods that all fall under the umbrella of "coffee". They're all a part of what has kept me deeply enchanted by coffee for well over a decade.

I do however think that they're all more or less demons, when compared to the big dogs of a good grinder, and a basic understanding of extraction. It doesn't have to be a chemical level understanding of what's happening to coffee during brewing (although I highly recommend Jonathan Gagné's "The Physics of Filter Coffee" if you're curious about that), but rather which knobs you can adjust to drive coffee flavour profiles in specific directions.

In its own right, the extraction-understanding "dog" probably swallows up the good-quality-grinder "dog". Because that's why we need a good grinder - even extractions, no matter the grind size. And of course for replicability between brews, so that once you nail the perfect extraction you can brew yourself another similarly perfect cup right after.

I don't think any amount of the flashy "demons" of coffee will ever be worth your time, if you aren't able to make informed decisions about your extraction. After all, extraction is why we brew.

The fantastic news is that none of this is as scary as it can sound. I'll almost guarantee there's a Hoffmann video out there that'll clear up everything you need to know in 20 minutes or less. The real danger of coffee as a hobby is that it gets very, very difficult to resist diving deeper once those first 20 minutes are up - good luck with that.

The Software Engineering Angle

Of course there's a software engineering angle! It's my academic background, professional career, and to this day still one of my main hobbies.

And as I stood there admiring the work of the calligrapher, a master of her craft, and had my mind wandering through the rich tapestry of assorted metaphorical dogs and demons in my life, I struggled to find a more perfect fit for the analogy than software engineering.

As I'm typing this out, it's already abundantly clear to me that this little subsection could be a small book on its own, but I'll try to be somewhat concise about it.

Software engineering is, at its worst, pretty much nothing but "demons". Every god forsaken day in our field, some new framework is born, and they do tend to really often be yet another wheel reinvention. This is part of the charm of the field, and luckily we do also get a lot of examples of genuine improvements, novel solutions, and fresh takes on classic problems.

We're a young engineering field, and one developing at an unheard of speed. It's hard to point to any other engineering field which is so drastically different today, than it was 50 years ago. And if there are any, chances are they were accelerated by fundamental shifts being born out of software engineering.

But still, we have our "dogs", or at least I believe that we do. I think there are fundamental skills as a software engineer, which transcend programming languages, frameworks, and problem contexts. And I think they're what separates good engineers from great engineers, and allows those rare, incredibly skilled individuals to be dropped into any context and still contribute towards solving the issue at hand.

I find it incredibly hard to narrow down what these fundamentals are exactly, and I'm far from qualified to make any absolute claims on behalf of our field (which isn't my intention either), but if I were to list a few, they would be: The ability to think in and design systems, the ability to translate real-world problems into the SWE context, the ability to communicate about software, and the ability to write good code.

I will not be opening the can of worms of what good code is and isn't, because it depends so incredibly much on the context the code exists within, and the problem it aims to solve. But readable, somewhat maintainable code for sure never hurt anybody, so I think that's a place to start.

I think the "dogs" of the software engineering world are evergreens, and a solid grasp of the fundamentals of our field will never be a wasted or worthless effort - no matter what LLM-snakeoil-salesmen on LinkedIn might be trying to tell you.

And speaking of ol' LinkedIn, this leads naturally into the next segment:

What This All Taught Me About B2B Sales

Absolutely nothing.

Conclusion

The thumbnail illustration I cooked up for this essay proves the original plaque's messaging in a very literal way - my badass demon seems rather pointless when my dog looks as goofy as it does. Although the original plaque held little advice about what to do if both your dogs and your demons aren't that great-looking. I'll have to figure that one out on my own.

I hope the essay itself managed to dig a bit deeper under the skin of the "Dogs & Demons" analogy, and maybe got you thinking about some of the neglected "dogs" of your day-to-day life or career - some places where glossing over the fundamentals might have ended up burying your attempts at the extraordinary.

For me personally, writing this obviously made me perceive almost everything through that lens during the writing-phase, but I do think that it maps so naturally onto almost any craft. So whether I'm brewing coffee, baking bread, cooking, or engaging in the beautiful craft of software engineering, there's almost always some dogs to perfect, so that my demons can get to stand out and shine properly.

None of this is groundbreaking, life-changing stuff - my coverage of it is probably pretty shallow. But regardless, it was some musings I wanted to share, born from a chill, cultural experience in beautiful Sapporo. A stream of thoughts that wanted to at least be written down, and maybe even read.

Thanks for reading along if you made it this far. I hope this might have inspired you to go deal with both your dogs and your demons - there's a lot of skill and beauty to be found in both.