[thr0waway1239]

Indeed, it is amazing how many 'soft' things surrounding the software can be improved without requiring to 'get into the zone' as a developer. Of course, you also need to do the actual work and not get bogged down in these peripheral tasks.

[throwanem]

I'm starting to think that actually writing code is more the "peripheral task" in the senior developer role - I find I spend most of my time working with other devs, doing code reviews, dealing with administrative stuff like our organization's change management process, and handling larger-scale, higher-level stuff like making our deployment process sane.

It's unusual these days that I just grab a feature or a hotfix and knock it out - generally only the ones too big and scary for anyone else to handle, and my guys are good enough that those are pretty rare.