age
Never any place I was meant to be
Supposing I found myself chasing another fly ball and ran head-on into a basketball backboard, supposing I woke up once again lying under an arbor with a baseball glove under my head, what words of wisdom could this man of thirty-odd years bring himself to utter? Maybe something like: This is no place for me.
This was never any place I was meant to be.
A timeless space
Our culture reveres youth, aspires to agelessness and is frightened by signs of age, wear and decay. As a consequence of this obsession, and the qualities of our man-made materials, contemporary environments have lost their capacity to contain and communicate traces of time. Our buildings often seem to exist in a timeless space without contact with the past or confidence for the future.
The complexity and the gray
One thing I assume of age is weariness.
Damned if I don’t get more tired every day.
Tired of what I do, following arcs like lobbed rocks — the inevitability of truth.But the complexity and the gray lie not in the truth, but in what you do with the truth once you have it.
Putting Thought Into Things
An Essay by Oliver ReichensteinBuilding structure requires serious listening, serious reflection, and serious imagination. All this requires experience, and no matter how experienced you are, it costs you. We spend our time and nerves to save users their time and nerves. Well-designed things give us the invaluable present of time. Well-designed products do not just save us time, they make us enjoy the time we spend with them. They make us feel that someone has been thinking about us, that a nice person took care of the little things for us. This is mainly why we perceive well-designed things as more beautiful the longer we use them, and the more used they become.
You're living in your very last house
A Song by Lo-Fang
Why Software is Slow and Shitty
Roman empire military
Rome military diagram.
Most company structures are based on the Roman empire military. CEO Caesar says he wants something, and the lieutenant managers below him on the org chart break it down into smaller tasks for the soldiers to accomplish.
On a development team, programmers are the soldiers of these shitty new armies. They open their Jira issues and add whatever feature it says to add, or fix what it says to fix. If I can save time by adding another dependency, or skip a meeting by implementing a mockup exactly as designed, why should I care?
Building is never a straight line
You might think that Mario 64 was built with tickets and sprints, but, according to interviews, there was no master plan, only the principles that the game should feel good and be fun. They started with just Mario in a small room, and tuned his animations and physics until he felt nice and responsive. After that, the levels were also created as they went, with the designers, developers, and director going back and forth using sketches and prototypes.
Building like this is never a straight line. Ideas and code get left on the cutting room floor because part of innovation is questioning whether what you made should exist. The process is cyclical and iterative, looking something like this.
Conversations, not commandments
Good software comes from a vision, combined with conversations not commandments. In a craft-focused environment, care for efficiency, simplicity, and details really do matter. I didn’t leave my last job just because I wanted to make something new. I left because I wanted to make it in a way I could be proud of.