Background textures of work An Article by Lucy Keer lucykeer.com One thing I've been enjoying about working as a technical writer is that the minute-by-minute texture of the work feels right. Something about formatting text, faffing about with SVGs, trying to rewrite a sentence more clearly... it's just enjoyable in itself, and I feel at home with it. ...Working as a programmer was very much not like that. There's something in the rough vicinity of professional dev work that I do like, which I could probably label as 'iterative hobbyist tinkering with websites'. I like working on something with a strong visual component, and I like to be inside of a fast feedback loop, and I'm mostly interested in just somehow bodging through until it works. I'm not very interested in either the computer-sciencey side of programming — data structures, algorithms — or the software-engineerey side of making things run reliably at scale in a maintainable way. So maybe it's not surprising that the minute-by-minute texture of professional programming was just... kind of bad. Occasional fun bits when I got into something, but the background experience was not fun. workproductivitymaking
Apologia A Chapter from A Search for Structure by Cyril Stanley Smith If the features of many are comparedPebbles on the beachHalf-formed perceptionInterdisciplinary
If the features of many are compared Almost all fields today are concerned in one way or another with hierarchical structure, and a theory, or perhaps more usefully a metaphor, common to all may emerge if the features of many are compared. Though the units in different fields are different, in all of them meaning comes through communication: patterns of communication are common to all, with aggregation leading to diversity or unity, and the clumps of unity themselves serving in turn as units in larger structrures based on more complex but still direct communication. hierarchystructure
Pebbles on the beach Newton picked up the pebbles on his metaphoric beach with an intellectual objective in mind, but his ancestor in paleolithic times picked up real minerals because he enjoyed looking at them: quite inadvertently he started the chain of practice and craftsmanship and thought that led to the diversity of specialized materials and generalized theory today. More like the early Homo sapiens than the sixteenth-century intellectual giant I have enjoyed a life of rather undisciplined wandering and search. searchcuriosity
Half-formed perception Science must be simple, yet the human brain has a structure that gives it the capacity for relating to the world in its undivided complexity in ways that are not logical, though they are effective. Aesthetic interest aroused by observation and half-formed perception seems usually, perhaps always, to precede exact analysis. intuitioncognition
Interdisciplinary These papers are probably to be called interdisciplinary—an “in” word these days—but any value they may have derives from the fact that the author started with a rather deep immersion in a single discipline. One cannot hope to understand the nature of interaction between impinging areas without a firm knowledge of at least one of them. knowledgescience