My first company was a startup. I was a junior backend developer building a delivery platform for traditional markets.

Back then I believed that writing good code was the whole of being a good developer. Design in the conference room, code at the monitor. That was all I knew about development.

Then launch day came. We got lucky, orders poured in the moment the service opened. But there weren't enough delivery riders to handle them.

It was an absurd situation, but the founder's instruction was firm.

"Developer or not, get on a bike and start delivering, now."

Honestly, I was a little disappointed at first. As a junior, I wanted to grow fast, to work with bigger systems and shinier tech. A "traditional market delivery app" wasn't exactly the picture I had in mind.

The moment it cracked

But strangely, the more I rode, the more crowded my head got.

At one shop owner's store, the notification sound wouldn't stop ringing. A new order would come in, the alert would chime, and then it just never turned off, a bug. It was something we'd never seen in the conference room. Out in the market, the screen was hard to read and the owners didn't know how to silence it. They were flustered, and there were more than a few of them.

But the real shock came next. These were not the people who would post about it in a CS channel. Without us knowing, this bug had been tormenting shop owners every single day.

I had clearly written good code. But a good product was not getting built.

What I learned

That day, it hit me. Sitting at a desk, taking the PM's spec and writing code against it, that alone is not what makes a developer.

Beyond that, understanding the essence of the product you're building and seeing the problem inside it through to the end, that is the essence of being a developer.

My posture toward development changed from that day. Whatever I was building, I started looking at the "Why" first. What business impact does this feature create? How does it actually reach the person using it? I started sketching those things out before I wrote a line of code.

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Even now, every time I pick up a new feature, I think back to that market alley. The shop where the alert wouldn't stop, the face of the owner who didn't know how to turn it off.

So before I write code, I always ask the same question first.

"Who is standing behind this code?"

That one line is everything I learned in that market alley.