DevSecOps Engineer, Author, and Mentor

Public Diminishment

For a genuinely senior engineer, the damage in a system of continuous availability is not limited to inconvenience.

A person can have decades of experience, published work, and deep mastery in one domain, then be placed into a public workflow built around unfamiliar tools, alien rhythms, and expectations. In that setting, the engineer's real strengths may become nearly invisible while every unfamiliarity is exposed in rotation.

That was part of what made this particular environment so painful. I wanted to be productive. I wanted to collaborate. I wanted to be a team player. The problem was not unwillingness. The problem was that participation in this model became cost-prohibitive. The environment demanded a form of visible contribution so poorly matched to my actual strengths that the effort required simply to remain legible inside the process began to crowd out the value I had been brought there to provide.

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MegaLinter is an excellent piece of software that ships with support for more than 130 linters, scanners, formatters, style checkers, and policy enforcement tools. Even with all of this functionality, there can be times when you need something that's just not available out of the box. Fortunately, drafting a plugin often involves creating a single YAML file.

MegaLinter Plugins

A MegaLinter plugin -- actually, any tool included with MegaLinter -- is a single YAML file. The YAML file describes how to install and configure the required tooling, run the tool, and how to interpret the results.

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Joel Spolsky's eighth item in the Joel Test asked a deceptively simple question: do programmers have quiet working conditions?

In 2000, that question was often about cubicles, doors, offices, and noise. In 2026, the question runs deeper. The modern threat to serious engineering work is not only a loud office or an open floor plan. It is the environment in which a developer is never truly allowed to disappear into the work at all.

Some organizations have recreated the worst features of the noisy office through remote work. They have taken a medium that could have supported autonomy, flexibility, asynchronous collaboration, and thoughtful silence, then used it to impose continuous shared presence instead. The language used to describe that arrangement is often upbeat and reassuring: collaboration, alignment, pairing, mobbing, teamwork, support. The lived experience can be something else entirely.

A more accurate phrase for some of these environments is continuous managed availability.

That phrase may sound severe, though I think it is precise. The problem is not collaboration itself. Pairing can be valuable. Mobbing can be valuable. Shared debugging can be valuable. Junior engineers and interns can learn a great deal by watching experienced people reason out loud. Hard migrations, incident response, tricky architectural changes, and unfamiliar codebases can absolutely benefit from intense synchronous work.

The trouble begins when a bounded technique becomes the default operating model for the whole day, every day.

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