What kind of order have you inherited wherever you are in your job or in your life today? That's what we're talking about in today's episode. My name is Jonathan Cutrell. You're listening to Developer Tea. My goal on this show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. In every scenario, we have some kind of order that we have inherited. And this is true for all living creatures, basically. This isn't just something that we have as humans that are unique to us, and I'm not talking about just our social orders, but there is some level of order that we inherit as humans, whether it's a biological order or more appropriately for this episode, the kinds of orders that we construct. And we are all whether we want to be or not governed to some degree by these orders, even if we reject those orders. Now, let me clarify what I mean by an order. These are the predetermined systems and facts that we rely on. Some of these systems and facts are certainly not reliable. If we were to put them under scrutiny, and nevertheless, we have adopted them. Orders happen in cultures. They happen in global orders, in nation, national orders, cultural orders, but they also happen in much smaller arenas. You can have an order for yourself. And in fact, everyone's own view of the world is a type of order. The kinds of systems that you perceive for your own life, that is an order. And we create these orders for ourselves through our habits. Some of the inheritance that we receive is from our former selves. Our actions that we take today very often determine the order that we live in tomorrow. And for the sake of today's episode, we won't get into too much detail about what makes up an order versus just our perception or what we assume about the world. But we can kind of define an order as things you believe to not be based on your own opinion. Things you believe that are true about the world, right? Things that you perceive to be true about the world or about the company that you work in or wherever you are, whatever your position is in life, things you perceive, but that you believe are not your opinion. You believe that the truth of that thing lies outside of your own perception. So why are we talking about this in an episode of Developer T? Because we do talk about philosophy on the show, but want to make this practical for you as an engineer. How does this matter to us in our day to day work? That's what we're going to talk about right after we talk about today's sponsor, Educative. For developers, the learning never stops. There are always new languages, frameworks, and technologies. Educative.io helps you learn faster and more efficiently. Out of video-based courses, which may have been a perceived order of these kinds of things before Educative came along, which require you to scrub back and forth. Their courses are all text-based. Educative has text-based courses. You can skim and double back over this content really easily, almost like you're reading a book, but this kind of content is also interactive. It has a pre-configured environment in each course. So you can practice as you learn. Courses cover all kinds of end-to-man topics like machine learning, Kubernetes, AWS, system architecture, and all of the things that you see on the job descriptions that you're probably reading. They just launch subscriptions at almost 50% off. So it's a good time to check it out. You can get an additional 10% off of everything by visiting Educative.io, slash Developer Tea. It's pretty awesome. They're giving 10% off of everything for being a listener of this show, that stacks on top of that 50% off for those subscription plans. Head over to Educative.io slash Developer Tea. Thanks again to Educative for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. We've talked a lot about breaking out of your assumptions on this show, and the reason that we're not done talking about this is because there's almost always another layer of assumptions that you can break through. Very often, the types of assumptions that we break through as engineers are around how we might solve a bug, or what we believe to be a bug in the first place. We see some kind of information in the logs, and we chased that down that rabbit trail, and we find out that we were wrong about the bug to begin with. In fact, maybe there was never a bug at all. But when we talk about orders, and how orders are governing the work that we do, and the lives that we lead, orders are another kind of deeper layer to the discussion about assumptions, because we're not just talking about something that's easy to change. And order typically is something that you didn't even realize was in the realm of changeable. Many examples of orders that we have kind of inherited might include our understanding of the solar system. Many of us might imagine the mobile that hovers over a crib when we think about a solar system, and those planets kind of rotating around the central sun in the middle, and this is our picture of a solar system. And it's easy to believe that that picture has remained static for all of time, that we kind of inherited that over time. And we all know that over time we actually learned about the solar system. We didn't know about all of the planets in the solar system, and even as recently as 2003, our definition of planets wasn't set in stone. Our understanding of order in the world goes beyond functional ways of thinking, mental models that we might apply or mix together to try to come to a conclusion, and order goes to a deeper layer than that. You might question, for example, what is my role as an engineer? Because we have kind of inherited at an industry level, right? This is kind of an order level of thinking. We've inherited types of titles. We compress a lot of information into these titles. And so a software engineer has one title, but can be 100 different things, or a thousand different things, perhaps an endless number of different things. And so if you're asking, should I as a software engineer do x, y, or z, you are asking a question that originates in some kind of order? Now this episode is not intended to demonize an order at all. In fact, orders are very useful, and often the orders that we share tend to be battle-tested. But rather, to make you aware that you are living in an order or a series of orders that you can inspect. And you are living in a culture where you have kind of adopted whether accidentally or on purpose the perspectives of some of the people around you, or you are rejecting some of the perspectives based on that culture. These orders are existing around us all the time, and they heavily affect your work as an engineer, because those orders exist in your companies too. In fact, the effect that an order can have on a company is so strong that the organization of your code tends to begin to mirror the organization of your people at some point. These kinds of effects do matter, and we should be able to inspect them together and consider whether we need to reshape our orders. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. Thank you again to Educator for sponsoring today's episode. If you want to get 10% off of everything, head over to educator.io slash Developer Tea. This show would not exist without you, the listener, and it helps us to get more listeners. It's probably no surprise, but what you may not know is the best way you can help us get more listeners for this show is to leave a review in iTunes. It helps us show up in search results more often. It helps us climb the ladder in the iTunes algorithm, but it also helps other people, like you, decide to pull the trigger to actually go and listen to the show. We could be at the top of the search list, but that's not always going to convince people that the show is worth listening to. More words, your reviews make a huge difference to our ability to keep on doing this podcast. Today's episode and every other episode of Developer Tea is a part of the spec network. If you want to find other podcasts that will help you level up as a developer, head over to spec.fm. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. Today's episode was produced by Sarah Jackson. My name is Jonathan Cutrell, and until next time, enjoy your tea.