Claire L. Evans has written a beautiful piece on the difference between growth and scalability:
Life is nonhierarchical, and it shirks top-down control. But scalability relies on hierarchy, on the isolation of elements stripped of history and context. It is predicated on the assumption that nature is little more than a raw material to be processed and commodified until it is spent. This is, of course, unsustainable — at any scale.
If you look at the available evidence, “craft at scale” is mutually exclusive with the kind of rapid and unending growth that’s the baseline expectation for traditional startups and public tech companies.
We’d say that’s obvious in other industries. Budweiser isn’t craft beer. IKEA isn’t heirloom-quality furniture. But we tend to treat software as immune to the typical relationship between quality and quantity.
As this year draws to a close, you might be tempted to make some ambitious new year’s resolutions for yourself. But maybe read this first.
Dormancy isn’t stagnant; it’s potentiating. It’s patient. If you’ve grown a lot in the past however many months or years and now feel that growth coming to a close, don’t fret right away. Wait. Reflect on what you’ve learned. Look for signs of spring. Move to where there’s water, if you need to. But don’t rush. There will be time again for running and jumping, when you’re ready.
Write about what you learn. It pushes you to understand topics better. Sometimes the gaps in your knowledge only become clear when you try explaining things to others. It’s OK if no one reads what you write. You get a lot out of just doing it for you.
Lots of good advice from Addy:
Saying no is better than overcommitting.
Visualising the growth of the internet.
Growing—that’s a word I want to employ when talking about my personal sites online. Like a garden, I’m constantly puttering around in them. Sometimes I plow and sow a whole new feature for a site. Sometimes I just pick weeds.
I like this analogy. It reminds me of the the cooking analogy that others have made.
Most of my favorite websites out there are grown—homegrown in fact. They are corners of the web where some unique human has been nurturing, curating, and growing stuff for years. Their blog posts, their links, their thoughts, their aesthetic, their markup, their style, everything about their site—and themselves—shows growth and evolution and change through the years. It’s a beautiful thing, a kind of artifact that could never be replicated or manufactured on a deadline.
This part of the web, this organic part, stands in start contrast to the industrial web where websites are made and resources extracted.
Oodles and oodles of data on cities, including gorgeous animations of urban growth over time.
Steven Pemberton’s presentation on the printing press, the internet, Moore’s Law, and exponential growth.
This wide-ranging essay by Nick Nielsen on Centauri Dreams has a proposition that resonates with my current talk about evaluating technology:
Science produces knowledge, but technology only selects that knowledge from the scientific enterprise that can be developed for practical uses.
Then there’s this:
The most remarkable feature of how we got from the origins of our species to the complex and sophisticated civilization we have today is that, with few exceptions, none of it was planned. Technology was not planned; civilization was not planned; industrialization was not planned; the internet was not planned.
The joy of starting from scratch:
I remembered a really nice thing: how to be goofily, absurdly proud of myself for figuring something out, a kind of pride I usually reserve for my children. This is the best part of dropping back to zero. The list of things you have to master is endless. And when you get one right — even a little, tiny one — everyone notices and gives you an adult version of an extra candy in your lunchbox.
A magnificent presentation from Maciej that begins by drawing parallels between the aviation industry in the 20th century and the technology industry in the 21st:
So despite appearances, despite the feeling that things are accelerating and changing faster than ever, I want to make the shocking prediction that the Internet of 2060 is going to look recognizably the same as the Internet today.
Unless we screw it up.
And I want to convince you that this is the best possible news for you as designers, and for us as people.
But if that sounds too upbeat for you…
Too much of what was created in the last fifty years is gone because no one took care to preserve it.
We have heroic efforts like the Internet Archive to preserve stuff, but that’s like burning down houses and then cheering on the fire department when it comes to save what’s left inside. It’s no way to run a culture. We take better care of scrap paper than we do of the early Internet, because at least we look at scrap paper before we throw it away.
And then there’s this gem:
We complained for years that browsers couldn’t do layout and javascript consistently. As soon as that got fixed, we got busy writing libraries that reimplemented the browser within itself, only slower.
It finishes with three differing visions of the web, one of them desirable, the other two …not so much. This presentation is a rallying cry for the web we want.
Let’s reclaim the web from technologists who tell us that the future they’ve imagined is inevitable, and that our role in it is as consumers.
The magnificent Brid.gy has 1000 accounts. Mazel tov!
This is probably single most important piece of software I’ve used this year: it has allowed me to turbo-charge my site, and feel truly independent. Thank you, Ryan (and Kyle), sincerely.
Mike Davis makes some conservative predictions about the near future.