Do one thing well

I was doing new hire training. I quoted this line from the famous Unix philosophy paper: “Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new ‘features’.” It suddenly occurred to me “Do one thing well” is not just a guideline for designing software, it is actually a philosophy covering all our life and work. Adam Smith proposed that “Specialization allows workers to produce large quantities of diverse products. Consumers are therefore able to access a wide range of goods and services. Specialization allows workers to develop definitive skill sets in specific areas. This gives room for further growth in these areas.” The whole Industrial Age is built on this simple idea. On December 1, 1913, Henry Ford installed the first moving assembly line for the mass production of an entire automobile. The time to build a car was reduced from more than 12 hours to one hour and 33 minutes. The secret: Workers specialized on one thing and did it well. Then Ford connected their work using the continuous flow of the assembly line. AWS uses this principle to divide cloud computing platform into hundreds of independent services, each specializes on one thing. KMS was born out of the idea that AWS and customer needed a single root of trust for data security. We specialize in cryptography: key creation, encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify; we try to do it really really well! Here is a Zen master explaining why we have anxiety and suffering in life: “When most people eat, they don't just eat; their mind are preoccupied with a thousand different fantasies. When they sleep, they don't just sleep; their minds are filled with any number of idle thoughts." And what is enlightenment: “When one is hungry, one eats; when one is tired, one sleeps." That is “Do one thing well!”