Building software is exhilarating, that’s why I got into it. I started with making small 2D C++ games in school. But I can’t say I built them myself.

Me and my friends would spend hashing ideas, reading manuals and trying new things, together. It was fun! Not just because we were making something we could actually use, but because we were doing it together.

And that drew me in. I thought that’s what it’d always be like to build software.

I couldn’t be more wrong. Building software now, feels dreadful, frustrating & scary.

You see, it’s a Tower of Babel situation. The people involved simply don’t understand each other. PMs don’t understand when I say why something can’t be done. I don’t understand what’s the PM’s insight behind the feature. The architect reviewing my design doesn’t understand why I am using Redis. The new team member doesn’t understand, well, anything.

And yet we toil, we ship, we deliver, as fast as we can. We arrange long meetings to understand things. We wait for people to get back. And sometimes we skip these steps and cause an outage.

How can it be anything but dreadful, frustrating and scary?

Building software is a collaborative effort, and it is supposed to be reflected in the tools that we use. But that’s simply not the case.

We need something that engineers find not just appealing but actually useful. At the same time, doesn’t alienate people. Something that democratises both knowledge and discourse.

And those are the tenets over which metz is built.

I imagine metz as a table, over which we talk, understand & debate. And it’s not just me, it’s my engineering team, it’s the team that’s depending on my work, the Product Manager who is orchestrating the feature, the designer, the architect and the EM.

All of us, bringing our best to the table. Building software, together, like a team.

Like I imagined how it’d always be.