Lukas Werner - GenZ Neoengineers Lukas Werner/Posts/GenZ Neoengineers<br>I&rsquo;ve started to notice a trend in some of the students I have met through<br>university, a handful that have decided to get really good at software<br>engineering. It is almost hard to describe, but these students have a degree of<br>confidence in their work that reminds me of some of the great software<br>engineers.

Many of these students tend to have a deep respect for the craft of software<br>engineering. They focus on the process, almost mythologizing the process and<br>pain in development. This focus often leads to avoiding the use of LLMs for<br>&lsquo;real&rsquo; engineering (define that however you would like). Some even go as far as<br>flat out rejecting the technology while others keep a healthy skepticism of it.

I&rsquo;m not 100% sure about this next aspect, but I&rsquo;ve noticed a general trend of<br>choosing technology and languages outside the norm. I&rsquo;ve heard this described as<br>both a viewpoint expression and a personality expression. In the words of Tobi Lütke:

… the programming language ends up being the mechanism for translating this<br>perfect picture you have in your head onto a canvas. And so, you know, if you<br>have, like, an amazing landscape and they give you crayons, it&rsquo;s possible to<br>make a masterpiece of crayons, but it will be, it will always be a crayons<br>painting. So this is sort of in the way Java and others, they just didn&rsquo;t<br>match the way my brain ended up constructing the relationships that make up<br>software.

– Tobi Lütke, describing Ruby<br>How I Built This: Shopify

This is another one of those anecdotal parts, but many seem to use bespoke<br>editors such as Neovim, Helix, Emacs, or similar. This could again be part of<br>that respect of the craft, and a desire to be as good at the drafting and editing<br>as possible.

They tend to be hella ambitious! These are the students who don&rsquo;t back down from<br>a hard challenge. A few of the wild projects I&rsquo;ve seen are a grammar checker Harper, a new computing<br>paradigm Math<br>Sandbox,an Arduino robot simulator Mosscap, a<br>voxel engine from scratch voxel-engine, and reverse engineered Mario Maker 2&rsquo;s APIs tgrcode.com<br>just to name a few.

Oh, and did I mention that it is intoxicating to talk to them. I can&rsquo;t help<br>but feel drawn in by their knowledge.

neoengineer - noun

An individual, part of a resurgence, who embraces and respects the craft of engineering. Often enjoys<br>solving hard problems.