Making

Looking at man, [the author of Genesis] sees in him something essentially divine, but when we turn back to see what he says about the original upon which the “image” of God was modelled, we find only the single assertion, “God created”. The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things.

It’s hard to even articulate this scenario with words and pictures. Sometimes you just have to feel it, use it, to understand the nuances.

This all might seem obvious — but the obvious is not always implemented. Sometimes it’s not as obvious as you might think. And sometimes the obvious is just too much work, so it gets skipped.

The point is: look and feel is hard to design, let alone spec, in a design tool. You need someone who understands what’s possible in the medium (and I mean the medium you’ll deliver the interaction in, not the medium you’ll design it in — those can be different).

You need someone who can do design work with code.

...You need either:

1. a person who understands and can work in both forms, or
2. two people who can work closely together to nail down all these details and make decisions along the way until you have something that feels right, that feels intentional, that feels designed all the way through — not “designed” then “implemented”.

My brain thinks of it like a rock you want to make smooth. You can discuss how to best smooth its edges, debate what tools will do it best, and so forth.

Or you can be like a river of water that washes over the rock incessantly day after day after day, smoothing over every last rough edge by encountering it over and over and over again.

You can get pretty damn far by incessantly encountering a piece of software over and over, fixing everything you find along the way that doesn’t feel right.

In other words, making a film (like making a website) is an iterative, evolutionary process. Many important motifs, themes, and meanings cannot be in the original draft because the people making it have not yet evolved their understanding to discover them. Only through the process of making these things can you uncover a new correspondence of meaning deeper and more resonant than anything in the original draft — which makes sense, given that the drafts themselves are not even developed in the medium of the final form, e.g. movies start as screenplays and websites as hand drawings or static mocks, both very different mediums than their final forms.

...the creative process is not an assembly line. Complications and in-process revisions are something to be embraced, not feared, because they are an inherent part of making.

It comes down to this annoying, upsetting, stupid fact: the only way to build a great product is to use it every day, to stare at it, to hold it in your hands to feel its lumps. The data and customers will lie to you but the product never will. And most product orgs suck because they simply don’t use the products that they’re building; they ship incremental nothings without direction because they’re looking at spreadsheets all day long filled with junk data nothings.

So the intention here was to have a conversation. We were going to choose an interesting person to ask interesting questions, and I would respond with interesting answers, and we would have an interesting piece of audio to listen to.

And the more I thought about it the less interesting that concept became.

The great Cheops pyramid took around a decade and half with a peak workforce of 40k workers, maybe 1 billion man hours. Parthenon around 36 million. The Colosseum maybe 100 million, same as Notre Dame, that gorgeous cathedral.

However, Facebook, how many man hours do you think that took?...The rather crazy answer is that it probably took close to 200 million man hours.

...It’s an achievement on par with the pyramids of Giza. Actually, more, in its necessity to keep running to stand still! Creating software is some of the most work we’ve put into building almost anything, far beyond the wonders in Rome or Luxor. The International Space Station probably still leads, at around 6 billion man hours, but man, its getting close.

...We knew what the pyramid would be when we started building it. The actual act of creation was not also simultaneously a journey of discovery. This is not the case in software. Is the time for Facebook's current application the correct consideration, or is it all the time we spent learning what to build and building underlying infrastructure part of it? Maybe one and not the other? Technical debt isn’t debt, it’s the commit history of the decisions made in the past.

The “slow food” movement encourages people to take the time to cook and savor meals made with love. It emphasizes care rather than the efficiency and utilitarianism of “fast food”.

What does the software version of that look like?

The typical software application is a product of a business trying to maximize profit and efficiency. There is a constant push to release new features and upgrades as quickly as possible, at the lowest cost possible. “Quality” is defined as the minimum possible bar that is still acceptable to paying customers. It is designed with the same priorities as “fast food”.

Of course, “slow” in the software world usually refers to annoyingly unresponsive user experiences. But here I mean “slow” in the sense that the software itself was designed and built slowly and with care, the same way that a meal can be prepared and eaten slowly and with care. Such software is likely to actually be more responsive because its architecture has been more carefully honed.

Problem

Buildings must always be built on those parts of the land which are in the worst condition, not the best.

Solution

On no account place buildings in the places which are more beautiful. In fact, do the opposite. Consider the site and its buildings as a single living ecosystem. Leave those areas that are the most precious, beautiful, comfortable, and healthy as they are, and build new structures in those parts of the site which are least pleasant now.

I posited in an earlier work that when you look through an information-theoretic lens, the fifteen properties [of The Nature of Order] cluster around three categories of conveying information, compressing information, and throttling information to facilitate uptake—a connection we will surely be revisiting. This falls in line with the semiotic aspect of the properties, in their capacity to communicate their significance just by looking at them.

So that's the program: one property per issue, mapped onto software. Then a conclusory, synthesis issue the end—at least one, or however many it takes to make sense of what we surface. Thanks for being part of the journey.

People are alive -- they behave and respond. Creations within the computer can also live, behave, and respond... if they are allowed to. The message of this talk is that computer-based art tools should embrace both forms of life -- artists behaving through real-time performance, and art behaving through real-time simulation. Everything we draw should be alive by default.

Part 1 talks about the potential of the computer as a new visual art medium. I show a collaboration between art and artist, with the art behaving through simulation, the artist behaving through performance, and the two of them working together, responding to each other.

Part 2 demonstrates a tool for "programming" how art should behave and respond. The artist directly manipulates art objects on the canvas, the way that visual art has always been created since the time of cave paintings. The tool is based around direct, geometric construction rather than indirect, algebraic "code".

This talk is actually about a way of living your life that most people don’t talk about. As you approach your career, you’ll hear a lot about following your passion, or doing something you love. I’m going to talk about something kind of different. I’m going to talk about following a principle — finding a guiding principle for your work, something you believe is important and necessary and right, and using that to guide what you do.

There are three parts to this talk. I’m first going to talk about the principle that guides a lot of my work, and try to give you a taste of what comes out of that. And I’m going to talk about some other people that have lived this way; what their principles are, what they believe in. But these are all just examples, to help you think about what you believe in, and how you want to live your life.

I set out to write a book about what to do to make a great work of art. Instead, it revealed itself to be a book on how to be.

It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.

Thus, I came to the conclusion that the designer of a new system must not only be the implementor and the first large-scale user; the designer should also write the first user manual. The separation of any of these four components would have hurt TeX significantly. If I had not participated fully in all these activities, literally hundreds of improvements would never have been made, because I would never have thought of them or perceived why they were important.

A few nights ago, I was looking at the moon and I thought, “I’d like to read a cultural history of the moon.” I googled, and there it was. My friend Matt said, “Ideally, that is exactly how one should find everything they read…and write.”

It’s really that simple. You find the books you want to read… and if you can’t find them, you write them.

Conventional tech industry product practice will not produce deep enough subject matter insights to create transformative tools for thought.

...The aspiration is for any team serious about making transformative tools for thought. It’s to create a culture that combines the best parts of modern product practice with the best parts of the (very different) modern research culture. You need the insight-through-making loop to operate, whereby deep, original insights about the subject feed back to change and improve the system, and changes to the system result in deep, original insights about the subject.

We follow these principles:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.

Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

Working software is the primary measure of progress.

Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.

Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential.

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Style is an expression of the interest you take in the making of every sentence.
It emerges, almost without intent, from your engagement with each sentence.
It's the discoveries you make in the making of the prose itself.

Where ambiguity rules, there is no "style"—or anything else worth having.

Pursue clarity instead.
In the pursuit of clarity, style reveals itself.

It’s not that I advocate for no note-taking. I just strongly believe in keeping it as elementary as possible, such that the note-taking itself doesn’t become the thrust of the endeavor. Leonardo da Vinci kept all of his notes in one big book. If he liked something he put it down. This is known as a commonplace book, and it is about how detailed your note-taking system should be unless you plan on thinking more elaborately than Leonardo da Vinci. Taping a bunch of cryptic phrases to the walls is also acceptable, or keeping a shoebox full of striking phrases on a jumble of papers, as Eminem did.

Everything has been composed, just not yet written down.

If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it. We need good taste to make good things. Instead of treating beauty as an airy abstraction, to be either blathered about or avoided depending on how one feels about airy abstractions, let's try considering it as a practical question: how do you make good stuff?

Eliminating waste is the key to efficiency – in the Toyota Production System, this is termed as:

Muda (waste),
Muri (overburden),
and Mura (irregularity).

The "cheap" web is a solarpunk philosophy of web design.

• Cheap to maintain: Most webpages should work indefinitely without falling over.
• Cheap to leave: Opting-out of the web should be painless.
• Cheap to access: Most websites should be compatible with screenreaders, etc.
• Cheap to participate: Interacting with the web should be possible on a Wii.
• Cheap to explore: Exploring the web should be pleasant on 1W of power.
• Cheap to contribute: Making/hosting websites should be easier than scrapbooking.

It may seem obvious, but a screenplay is not a film. It’s a tool in service of making a film.

...When a movie is released in theaters, it would be silly to think of its screenplay as the “source of truth”. At that point, the finished film is the “source of truth”. Anything left in the screenplay is merely a reflection of previous intention.

So do people take the time to go back and retroactively update the screenplay to accurately reflect a finished film?

No, that would be silly. The finished film is what people pay to see and experience. It is the source of truth.

Similarly, in making websites, the only source of truth is the website people access and use. Everything else — from design system components to Figma mocks to Miro boards to research data et. al. — is merely a tool in service of the final form.

This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.

Dead simple, drag & drop websites for anything.

Websites don’t have to be so cookie cutter. Try it out — tap Edit in the bottom right, then tap anything on this page.

I tried
To make a soul
From scratch

If I could dream you in meticulous detail
Would you ever come alive?
Would you ever come alive?
I'll dedicate my days and 14 of my nights
Will you ever come alive?
Will you ever come alive?

During [Mark Boulton's talk on typography at Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, he] admonished the audience members who don’t allocate a writing budget to projects. Riffing on his thoughts on art direction he pointed to sites like A Brief Message where the design is driven by the content rather than the content simply filling up a pre-designed template. He makes a good point but, as I said to him later, he’s talking about a certain type of website.

There are some kick-ass designers, such as Mark, Jason and Khoi, who are fortunate to work on editorial sites. There are other equally kick-ass designers, such as Hannah and George, who work on social media sites where the content is written by the audience. In many ways, that second category is more challenging. The designer must somehow create a design that communicates without ever knowing the details of the message. That lack of control might seem like a hindrance but in many ways it simply reflects the inherent lack of control in this medium.

Of course writing is still very important, even on social media sites. Perhaps especially on social media sites. Writing—and by extension, typography—is part of the user interface. One of the reasons why Moo’s design works so well is because Denise writes kick-ass copy as well as crafting great visual designs. Design is about communication and creating the right tone of voice (through words and type) is critical to successful communication—just ask 37 Signals.

Going back to Mark’s example of content-driven design, A Brief Message has published a rather wonderful piece by Dan Saffer called Making Stuff vs. Making Stuff Up in which he argues that design needs to be a craft, not a cerebral exercise.

The evidence seems to back this up. Speaking personally, all of my favourite web designers have one thing in common: they know how to write HTML and CSS. Dan Cederholm, Doug Bowman and Jon Hicks aren’t just markup-literate; they are markup craftsmen. It’s this ability to work hands-on with the raw materials of the Web that allows them to put all the theory of typography, colour and layout into practice.

Kahn's preferred medium was charcoal. He liked to use the side of his hand to rub out the thing he was drawing in order to draw it over, and over again.

Turning the tracing paper into a palimpsest; where some trace of each previous marking is still there, only blurred out and faded back by Kahn's rubbings-out and re-renderings, so that in what he made there is also the record of how it was made.

Charcoal on trash collected over time acting as ersatz animated film recording how Kahn's ideas developed.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate [designers] being appreciated for our brains (which is a little like being told you have a great personality). But divorcing “thinking” from “making” reduces design to “concepting.” And while concepting is valuable, concepts are much easier to have than finished products. Almost anyone can have a concept.

It is in the detail work that design really happens — that the clever, delightful moments of a design occur. Those are as important, if not more so, than the concept itself. The details are where we earn our money and our respect, and the details can only be worked out through making stuff.

I'm Jacob — a designer and coder who creates things with computers (Fig 1) 'Digital Craftsman' best describes my skill set.

Digital projects thrive when designers understand how they will be built. Just as an architect understands how a structure is created, the same should be true on the web.

As soon as I make something, I think of the 100 things I want to have next. That’s why prototyping is good. You don’t need to have much imagination, you just listen to what the prototype tells you.

Though you might not think it from the comic, I’m actually sympathetic to questions about tools and process, as I myself am a kind of process junky. I love hearing about how other writers work.

I’m also not someone who dismisses questions about tools with the line “the tools don’t matter.” In fact, I think tools matter so much that if you don’t talk about them correctly you can do some damage.

...What I love about John Gardner and Lynda Barry is that they believe that the tools you use do matter, but the point, for them, is finding the proper tools that get you to a certain way of working in which you can get your conscious, mechanical mind out of the way so that your dreaming can go on, undeterred.

You have to find the right tools to help your voice sing.

This is a list of task[s] that need to be done on the website. There is no order and is just a list of things that I need/want to do.

The Builder mindset often eschews policy completely and focuses on the macro issues, rather than the micro complexities. It is a mindset that seeks to find very elaborate, hypothetical-but-definitely-paradigm-shifting, futuristic technology to fix current problems, instead of focusing on a series of boring-sounding and modest reforms that might help people now.

…The worst version of Builder mentality is that their dreams become reality, but instead of maintaining their creations, they simply move onto the next Big Thing, leaving others to deal with the mess they’ve made.

JAMES TAYLOR-FOSTER

EDITOR & WRITER of essays & reviews
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGNER,
MAKER of exhibitions

There must be millions less of things, less words, less gestures, less of everything. But every word and every gesture will become more valuable. If we can put it all into perspective we will need less things as a result.

It’s a game we’d been dreaming of for years: a giant rube goldberg machine builder in the style of the classic Incredible Machine games, made of a patchwork of machines created by individual xkcd readers.

...Sometimes an idea feels like it emerges fully-formed, but when you start talking about it, you realize there’s still a dizzying array of decisions to make. Thus ensued 5 days of brainstorming to discover each of us had slightly different core beliefs about what this comic should be:

• Where do the balls come from?
• Does everyone see the same machine? What is its purpose?
• How can players interact with it?
• And most importantly… why do they?

We believe that in-person collaboration is essential to our culture and our future. If we take a moment to reflect on our unbelievable product launches this past year, the products and the launch execution were built upon the base of years of work that we did when we were all together in-person.

Andrei Tarkovsky shot the Stalker 3 separate times in abandoned nuclear power plants in Russia across multiple decades. It ended up killing him.

The purpose which guided him was not impossible, though it was supernatural. He wanted to dream a man: he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality. This magical project had exhausted the entire content of his soul; if someone had asked him his own name or any trait of his previous life, he would not have been able to answer.

If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.

recap: what is software?

software is, yes, text files with instructions to computers
it’s also an expression of our understanding of a real-world problem
and an expression of our analysis from a computing perspective

recap: how do we build it?

there’s no perfect answer to this
building software requires a team to

• align on their understanding
• plan an approach
• coordinate with each other
• iterate in response to feedback

recap: what happens after we ship?

software lives on long after we build it
most of its cost is maintenance
you have to understand it to maintain it
eventually we need to replace it

And that’s how we turn a napkin sketch into something that affects the physical world.

You have some wonderful stories of basically getting away with stuff at the studios.

I’d learned one very simple trick: say yes. Simply say yes…You say yes, and you never do it.

That’s great advice for life.

It is. Don’t fight them. Don’t waste your time struggling with them and trying to make sense to them. They’ll never understand.

How do you make a game that’s fun? ...You have to focus on gameplay. In order for the final product to be fun and exciting, the core game play needs to be fun and exciting. The creator of Mario calls this 手応え (tegotae), which is often translated as “game feel”. To find this game feel, you need to build small prototypes around a single idea, play test them, and then follow the fun. Nintendo does this, indie game devs do this; this is the not-so-secret of the gaming industry.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

The problem with Test-Driven Development is that you have to think about what you want the code to do before you write it. And that ruins the surprise.

But few tyros come to it saying to themselves “I’ve got to get a job in a production department” — and in this they are missing out on what is really the single most distinctive part of book publishing. Any business needs people to market and sell the product, and has to have skilled folks out there buying raw materials: it’s the shaping of the raw material into the salable product that makes this business radically different from that one. Because even with computers and e-books, authors’ manuscripts do not automatically turn into books.

I always thought of myself as a house. I was always what I lived in. It didn't need to be big; it didn't even need to be beautiful – it just needed to be mine.

I became what I was meant to be. I built myself a life. I built myself a house.

This investigation of the possibility of craft in the digital realm, Malcolm McCullough observes that the emergence of computation as a medium, rather than just a set of tools, suggests a growing correspondence between digital work and traditional craft.

Tool development, as an umbrella term that is used to describe software that is both utilitarian and a toy, has become deeply important to me. I think there is something interesting to observe from that space, especially when it is centered around making interesting visual experiments functional to artists. It invites abundance and generocity

It’s very interesting, I think, to try and analyze how screenwriting fits in with editing. As a writer-director, I do a lot of editing on the page. I very much enjoy the technology we have with word processing. It’s technology that’s been around a long time. But I wrote my first screenplay on a manual typewriter, so to me it’s still a bit of an innovation.

I love overwriting and then editing the same way I edit the images and, indeed, the dialogue and stuff when we get in the edit suite. I think the relationship between the two is very interesting, because editing is a key feature of cinema that’s not shared in other media. Eisenstein, he summarized it, “Shot A plus Shot B gives you Thought C.”

The quality of a musical performance depends on the performers as much as on the score. The performers are said to be interpreting the score, but in fact they are adding intention of their own to those of the composer, recognizing that no score can in practice ever fully express the intentions of a composer, that it can never be more than an indication, a sketch; and no designer can in practice ever produce more than a sketch.

I well remember an occasion in 1962 when in a remote Iranian village I asked a blacksmith famous for his superior penknives to tell me the difference between iron and steel. “What’s the difference?” he replied. “What’s the difference between an oak tree and a willow — they have different natures and one must adapt to them.” He did not accept the suggestion that some material absorbed from the fire’s charcoal might have something to do with it, and he would not have understood a word of any lecture I could have given him on diffusion, crystal structure, and phase transformations; yet he could make a good knife and I could not.

@soleio: making a note-taking app is the software designer’s version of homebrewing beer or releasing an EP

[I] had a conversation with a software engineer the other day and she said that making your own todo app and notes app is something everyone should do, since they are such personal tools. I thought that’s a really interesting way to look at it and it kind of explains why there is no one good note-taking app.

Software is ephemeral. It is building sand castles in the air, forever shifting, changing, eroding.

...But software isn’t just a digital artifact; it’s also a lever for shifting human thought and behavior. In their book Understanding Computers and Cognition, Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores write:

We encounter the deep questions of design when we recognize that in designing tools we are designing ways of being.

I think about this quote a lot, about how the design of a tool unlocks new human capabilities, and about how changes in our capabilities influence both how we see and how we act in the world.

And this, I believe, is my own personal reason for making software. I want to help bring about new ways of being in the world, however small. New ways to think. New ways to create. New ways to share ideas with others.

Holistic technologies are normally associated with the notion of craft. Artisans, be they potters, weavers, metal-smiths, or cooks, control the process of their own work from beginning to finish. Using holistic technologies does not mean that people do not work together, but the way in which they work together leaves the individual worker in control of a particular process of creating or doing something.

The opposite is specialization by process; this I call prescriptive technology. Here, the making or doing of something is broken down into clearly identifiable steps. Each step is carried out by a separate worker, or group or workers, who need to be familiar only with the skills of performing that one step. This is what is normally meant by "division of labor".

1. I want it to feel intuitive
2. I want any new features to be platform features, not one-offs.

And the second of those is weird, right? It’s like sketching out a toy spaceship, having a list of rules about play, and attempting to simultaneously invent the shape of the Lego brick.

That’s platform design I suppose. Redesigning a newspaper will mean bouncing between comps and style guides, designing both. Inventing the iPhone user interface will have seen apps and app paradigm evolving together.

I wish I spent more time moving atoms and less time moving symbols.

I enjoy reading and writing, but I do more of it than I'd like.

...It is far more rewarding to make things with atoms than symbols. Atomic creations are the things to be most proud of. The symbols on the screens should help us move and produce more, rather than sit and consume more symbols.

The best way to test a product is to use it yourself. What does it mean to dog food or fish food a product?

Dogfooding (verb) means using your own product before it's launched. Dog fooding can help with quality assurance, user experience, and potentially new ideas.

I'm not sure the first person to use the term, but it most likely comes from "eating your own dog food" – i.e., making dog food that you yourself would eat. Dogfooding usually (nowadays) refers to using a product much closer to release.

Fishfooding is a more nuanced version of dogfood for a much smaller selection of testers for a much earlier product.

To fishfood a product or use a product in fish food is common at Google, the only place I've heard the term regularly used.

The beauty of self-employment lies in the courage to build something, from the bottom up, that can stand on its own. The beauty of self-employment is seeing your capacity to be functional. You're taking risks. You have skin in the game. Be proud if you're building some sort of artistic, cultural, or entrepreneurial project. Even though you're not rich. You're entitled to be a tad arrogant.

Most people think that "X does whatever he wants because he's free." The reality is vice versa. He's free because he does whatever he wants.

As humans, we're surrounded by objects. We pay very little attention to the vast majority of them but they're there, they're all around us. Dieter Rams famously said that "Good design is as little design as possible" and he's not wrong. Good design is design that does its job without getting in your way. But good design can—and sometimes should—also stand out because good design is the embodiment of passion, of caring for a craft, of loving the process.

And that's precisely why I love everything Craig Mod does. I think I first stumbled on his work almost a decade ago at this point and what really caught my attention was the love for the process. From the newsletters to the essays to the books, everything is deliberate and you can just see that he just cares. The feeling I get is that there's almost a sense of responsibility when putting something out into the world and that's something I can relate to.

I am tired of the premise that creation means productivity––especially in the laborious sense...Creation has become mangled with labor in a world that demands man to monetize all of their hobbies and pursuits. In return, it seems empty, almost sad, really––to be the designer spending weekends again on the screen.

To tell you what I like to do in the weekends, I like to do the sad thing...The ‘good’ people tell you to detach your life from your workspace, but this summer, I think I’ve just realized how much I adore what I have the luxury of working on everyday.

In the weekend, I make. I make not because it’s the only thing I have ever known, but because it’s the most certain way forward.

More than making money… more than that feeling of launching a new product, feature, website, or app… the idea I am coming to value most in my professional life is the feeling of “play”. Sometimes play is being on my own with high autonomy and low consequences, sometimes it’s getting to choose new and fun technologies, but where play is most valuable is when it involves other people.

...If there’s a downside to the Hot Potato process it’s that there’s a lot of re-building mid-flight as new requirements trickle in or you discover new constraints. When you build frequent iteration and circling back into the process, it can lead to a feeling of never being “done”. That is a tax on cognitive load, like open browser tabs, that may not neurologically suit everyone. Others might even prefer a more linear assembly line process.

If I had to choose which process I prefer, I’d pick reworking a component over-and-over in a Hot Potato process versus other alternatives.

Maintenance has taken on new resonance as a theoretical framework, an ethos, a methodology, and a political cause. This is an exciting area of inquiry precisely because the lines between scholarship and practice are blurred. To study maintenance is itself an act of maintenance. To fill in the gaps in this literature, to draw connections among different disciplines, is an act of repair or, simply, of taking care — connecting threads, mending holes, amplifying quiet voices.

We like to think about this process as the game discovering itself over time. Because as iterators, rather than designers, it’s our job to simply play the game, listen to it, feel it, and kind of feel out what it seems to want to become - and just follow the trails of what’s fun.

What's really challenging for me working on something on an idea level for close to 8 years, it's really hard to not look at yourself. The decision-making process includes a conversation with myself: sometimes I'm going to side with 2015 version of Nick, sometimes the 2017 Nick isn't the right guy for this, etc... So much of the process of making the movie has changed the movie. I really just tried to make the movie I wanted to make when I was 22. When I serviced that, it worked really well.

Blueprints lead to the making of things that are abstract, not always based on reality. Once something becomes abstract, it breeds disconnectedness — separation and the inability to connect with our surroundings. People buy houses from blueprints, but then don't like the actual house: "What on earth is this? I had no idea it was going to be like this...etc."

In 2014, I wrote about my belief that design and engineering are best when tightly woven together. That’s truer now than ever.

If I’m feeling confident, I’ll jump right into my text editor…From here, more functionality is added and the code is tweaked until the feature looks and feels right to me. Whether it’s something simple like this, or prototyping a new interaction like multi-connect, there’s no substitute for designing with real code.

In rare cases when I have ideas or plans that I’m less confident about, it’s time to break out the paper, pens, and markers,

Because the Kinopio interface elements and aesthetic are full-grown, I almost never use traditional design software anymore.

Even a soul submerged in sleep
is hard at work and helps
make something of the world.

When you find yourself in a context where agile is being practiced by seizing power on developers, squeezing more features out of a delivery team in a given time, I´m sorry for you and I hope you find a way to change. But it doesn´t render the agile values false. Agile is serious play and it´s worth striving for this way of working - you don´t need to name it agile and probably it will not help you with your management to name it serious play either. Instead, try to find a way of doing what you came for, building and making something beautiful and meaningful together with your colleagues.

The [Silmarils] are good; their making was at least potentially innocent; but afterward arose a lust for owning and controlling that led to great tragedy… The aspect of humanity which the elves represent most fully – both for good and ill – is the creative one.”

And this is why “making” in and of itself is not the answer to our decadent moment. “Love of things, especially artificial things, could be seen as the besetting sin of modern civilisation, and in a way a new one, not quite Avarice and not quite Pride, but somehow attached to both” – and this is the Fëanor Temptation. It is in light of this temptation that I advocate repair, which is a mode of caring for what we have not made, but rather what we have inherited. We will not be saved by the making of artifacts — or from the repair of them, either; but the imperative of repair has these salutary effects: it reminds us of our debt to those who came before us and of the fragility of human constructs.

Form comes from wonder. Wonder stems from our 'in touchness' with how we were made. One senses that nature records the process of what it makes, so that in what it makes there is also the records of how it was made. In touch with this record we are in wonder. This wonder gives rise to knowledge. But knowledge is related to other knowledge and this relation gives a sense of order, a sense of how they inter-relate in a harmony that makes all things exist. From knowledge to sense of order we then wink at wonder and say How am I doing, wonder?

Is software engineering “really” engineering? A lot of us call ourselves software engineers. Do we deserve that title? Are we mere pretenders to the idea of engineering? This is an important question, and like all important questions, it regularly sparks arguments online.

One of the oldest and most deeply ingrained of Japanese attitudes to literary style holds that obvious structure is contrivance, that too orderly an exposition falsifies the ruminations of the heart, that the truest representation of the searching mind is just to 'follow the brush.'

He will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom
Nor heed, nor see, what things they be;
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man.

You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday, and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.

During the design process, the architect gradually internalizes the landscape, the entire context, and the functional requirements as well as his/her conceived building: movement, balance and scale are felt unconsciously through the body of the observer, the experience mirrors the bodily sensations of the maker. Consequently, architecture is communication from the body of the architect directly to the body of the person who encounters the work, perhaps centuries later.

The design is thus the mental formulation, which Sayers calls “the Idea,” and it can be complete before any realization is begun. Mozart’s response to his father’s inquiry about an opera due to the duke in three weeks both stuns us and clarifies the concept.

For most human makers of things, the incompletenesses and inconsistencies of our ideas become clear only during implementation. Thus it is that writing, experimentation, “working out,” are essential disciplines for the theoretician.

"The process in creating that kind of canvas was like—what?—10 percent action and 90 percent ass scratching. First you prepared yourself, cleaning up and arranging your palette and tools, sweeping the floors, and then finally, when you were ready, you faced the empty white expanse of white canvas and made your first stroke."

I couldn’t seem to convince my writers that I was genuinely ok working with a super rough first draft — i.e., that I’d harbor no hidden judgment about their intelligence, commitment, or excellence at their craft.

So I came up with a new word. “Just give me a v0.crap.” (Pronounced “version zero dot crap”.)

v.0.crap works because it’s attuned to the psychology of the situation. It’s punching through our innate desire not to “look bad”, plus years of corporate conditioning that tells us not to share less-than-polished work. It’s easier for people used to delivering exceptional work to feel they’ve exceeded the goal of “crap”; they can sit comfortably in “good enough for the current purpose.”

Design is non-linear. At Figma, we often talk about “embracing the mess,” and that really means leaning into the chaos and complexity that makes the design process what it is. Even once you have the seedling of an idea, you need to explore and iterate, then pull back and evaluate to see what’s working and what’s not. Sometimes you’ll scrap an idea after a brainstorm session, and other times you’ll get pretty far with a concept, but still need different perspectives and input to move forward.

If you ask, “Why is Thekla’s construction taking such a long time?” the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer, “So that its destruction cannot begin.”

Imperfect, handmade glass has virtues: these are irregularity, distinctiveness, and what the writer refers to vaguely as 'character'. The two sets of images for glassblowing are thus inseparable; only by understanding how something might be done perfectly is it possible to sense this alternative, an object possessing specificity and character. The bubble or the uneven surface of a piece of glass can be prized, whereas the standard of perfection allows no room either for experiment or for variation.

One of the reasons that Japanese katanas are such strong blades is the technique used to make them called folding. A swordsmith will forge and hammer out a long blade, and then fold the steel onto itself, repeating the process dozens of times, if not more. This technique has an advantage. Each time the blade is folded some of the oxygen and impurities are removed, making it harder and stronger. It produces a sword that is durable and resistant to wear, and the folded blade has become the stuff of legends.

Sometimes, working on a website can feel like that. ...You give it a broad, rough pass that takes into account as many of the requirements you have, and the corners you’re able to see around.

And then, you fold it. Once you have the site all laid out, you can see where some of the impurities are. Where there are rough edges to the experience, and places where information is not immediately apparent, or the design starts to fall apart.

And so you can go over it again, from the start, with new assumptions and fresh ideas. You’ll find the holes you missed the first time, and fill them. You’ll add details to pages you hadn’t even anticipated.

During the construction period, the project architect—who has been involved since the beginning intuitive drawings—supervises the construction. Often on larger projects, the project architect has moved to the site for as long as a year and half. In this way as questions come up during the course of the project, the choices that are made are made with a sense of the history of the idea and they are true design decisions that accrue to wholeness. They are not simply the result of expediency in the field. This position of “not knowing a priori” is antithetical to the general model of the architect as hero. This is a damaging model because it discourages the slowness of process that comes from the patient search. Certainty is a prison.

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.”

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by the exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures….

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.

We're bombarded by more information than ever before. With the rise of all this information comes a rise of the amount of bullshit we're exposed to. Death to Bullshit is a rallying cry to rid the world of bullshit and demand experiences that respect people and their time.

...As the landslide of bullshit surges down the mountain, people will increasingly gravitate toward genuinely useful, well-crafted products, services, and experiences that respect them and their time. So we as creators have a decision to make: do we want to be part of the 90% of noise out there, or do we want to be part of the 10% of signal? It's quite simple really:

• Respect people and their time.
• Respect your craft.
• Be sincere.
• Create genuinely useful things.

Related to The Management Strategy that Saved Apollo 13.

A specific type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation (sometimes the creation of the story itself).

We are working to correct the course of the software industry. We are a community of low-level programmers with high-level goals. Originally inspired by Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero, we dig deep into our systems and learn how to do things from scratch. We're not satisfied by the latest popular language or the framework of the month. Instead we care about how computers actually work. Software quality is declining, and modern development practices are making it worse. We need to change course.

The way designers and developers work together today is broken. It’s too siloed and separate; “collaboration” is a fantasy that few enjoy.

The state of advertising in the 1940s was similar. All of that changed when copywriter Bill Bernbach met art director Paul Rand. Their collaborative working style led to the birth of the idea of “the creative team,” the mutual respect and partnership between art director and copywriter that tended to yield unique results. Bob Gage, an art director that worked for DDB, the agency Bernbach co-founded, described it like this:

“Two people who respect each other sit in the same room for a length of time and arrive at a state of free association, where the mention of one idea will lead to another idea, then to another. The art director might suggest a headline, the writer a visual. The entire ad is conceived as a whole, in a kind of ping pong between disciplines.”

Isn’t that what we all strive for in our jobs? True collaboration with equals and partners? Ideas that build off one another? Why does this seem so far away for some of us?

I've been thinking a lot about the type of software I want to build and use. I spend so much of my screen time using large feature-heavy software, which are one-size-fits-none at best or outright hostile. I'm left frustrated, distracted, and wanting something better.

I write lots of mini software projects as a hobby, and a couple have been successful. By success I don't mean that other people use them, but instead that I keep using them. Or that my toddlers played with a couple mini games I built, which taught them to use a keyboard and mouse. These are not things I'd ever put on my resume or claim as examples of good code, but I'm oddly satisfied each time I build one.

...Building software for yourself that you'll actually enjoy using is an adventure in self-discovery. You'll learn a little more about what motivates you and how your brain works. Starting with something small like a to-do list helps you focus on your personal user-stories instead of getting caught up building complicated internals.

One of the most pervasive features of these buildings is the fact that they are “modular.” They are full of identical concrete blocks, identical rooms, identical houses, identical apartments in identical apartment buildings. The idea that a building can - and ought - to be made of modular units is one of the most pervasive assumptions of twentieth-century architecture.

Nature is never modular. Nature is full of almost similar units (waves, raindrops, blades of grass) - but though the units of one kind are all alike in their broad structure, no two are ever alike in detail.

The same broad features keep recurring over and over again. And yet, in their detailed appearance these broad features are never twice the same.

How different am I, making clock number 15, from the process of natural selection laboring under changing conditions to generate the biological constructs? That ancient evolutionary system works on the basis of trial and error repeated in huge numbers over immense spans of time, with the failures discarded and the successes retained. At times it seems to me that my clock making is quite similar, as my mind, just barely thinking, sorts through huge numbers of possibilities and discards them as failures before even trying them, so the few that are made have a pretty good chance of success. Is this foresight some form of understanding? I think not. No revelation here, just enough thinking to spur the maker on to cut some piece of metal which, once made, might fail or succeed. Yet — in either case — the thing made and its creation remains the sole root of any real understanding that takes place. The clock is crude but gets built, and even in its base simplicity teaches its maker how to understand what must be understood for something to be made.

The tech info-sphere is currently awash in talk of real vs. fake, best vs. rest, do this vs. that, tech utopianism vs. AI hysteria, top-tier vs. mid-tier, use AI or be used, and founders vs. workers vs. managers vs. VPs. People are processing that the companies they joined are, well, companies with factions, investors, confirmation bias, and competing needs.

...It's all a self-reinforcing loop—a doom loop that's dividing people. We need to find ways to rekindle and amplify the excitement, fun, challenge, and joy—for our well-being and the well-being of others. We need to lift people without being so serious.

Whoever has the power and influence to create bastions of challenging fun where teams can experience how rewarding it can be to make stuff and have an impact together—I think that's what we need now. It is also what will jumpstart teams and kickstart hiring because teams having fun will be much more impactful, and real teams will be less divisive.

Productivity? Efficiency?

I’ll take “Having fun building stuff that has impact” any day.

And essentially the idea there is that one is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden.  One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life.

What this means, really, is a rethinking of one’s own position as a creator. You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together. Gardener included.

There are two types of work: growth work and maintenance work.

Growth work involves making new things. It can be something big or small. In either case, growth work often follows a loose process.

Maintenance work is different. Maintenance work involves caring for the resources and instruments that make growth work possible. This includes tools, but also body and mind.

Maintenance is ultimately in service to growth. But effective growth can’t happen without maintenance. As with so many things, the ideal is a healthy balance — and it doesn’t come without struggle.

The beauty of kasuri is received as a gift. As long as the laws of nature are upheld, the beauty of kasuri remains intact. This demonstrates the curious principle that the artisan is deprived of technical freedom but works in the freedom of nature.

In this sense, kasuri can be said to be created in a state of freedomless freedom.

The internal structure of a work of art in metal can often throw as much, or more, light on its origin as can be derived from stylistic analysis. Moreover, the techniques employed can provide clues to the habits of mind of the people who originated them.

…Perhaps the most important reason for structural studies of museum objects is that the intimate knowledge so derived as to the way in which an object has been made adds so greatly to the aesthetic enjoyment of it. Very often some detail and sometimes the whole of an effective design arises directly in the exploitation of the merits and the overcoming of the difficulties of a specific technique, in the reaction between the artist’s fingers and his material.

You’re looking for an online service to fill some need in your life. You look at three or four competing products and they all get close but none of them do everything you want. Or maybe they do tick all the boxes but they cost that little bit more than you’re comfortable paying. After spending a few hours on your search that little voice pops up in your head with that phrase that you really don’t want to hear:

Maybe you should just write your own version. How hard can it be?

A couple of hours later, you have something that vaguely works, you’ve learned more than you thought there was to learn about some obscure corner of life and you’re the proud owner of another new domain.

Mrs. Shimada is very cheerful, and Mr. Shimada is very intelligent; he is able to perceive things objectively, and discern what is precious. I get the sense they live critically, evaluating what is important. Keeping these characteristics in mind, I think about what kind of plan should be provided, in what proportions, and in what kind of house—to best suit these people. I'm constantly reminded of their faces as I prepare the plans. I'm always thinking about human happiness. If it doesn't make you happy, I don't think it's worth building.

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.

Getting things in perfect shape can mean removing the traces, erasing the evidence, of a work in progress. Once this evidence is eliminated, the object appears pristine. Perfection of this cleaned-up sort is a static condition; the object does not hint at the narrative of its making.

I make a bunch of prototypes for my work at tldraw, todepond, and ink & switch.

They involve a planning stage and a building stage. The bit in between is called the bite.

It’s that moment when you decide to stop planning and just build the damn thing.

Here there is no mastery of unnameable creative processes, only the patience of a craftsman, chipping away slowly; the mastery of what is made does not lie in the depths of some impenetrable ego; it lies, instead, in the simple mastery of the steps in the process, and in the definition of these steps.

It is widely accepted that creative design is not a matter of first fixing the problem and then searching for a satisfactory solution concept; instead it seems more to be a matter of developing and refining together both the formulation of the problem and ideas for its solution, with constant iteration of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation processes between the two “spaces” – problem and solution.

We do say “no” very quickly, not just to designs, but to everything. That led me into thinking about the psychology of software engineers and what makes us the way we are.

We should say that anybody has skill enough to build a good dry-stone wall but that few know how to design one, for the placing of the stones is a matter of knowledge and judgment, not of dexterity.

...more concerned with process than with product, with the actual construction of a self than with self-expression.

There’s lots of ways to be, as a person. And some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there.

And you never meet the people. You never shake their hands. You never hear their story or tell yours. But somehow, in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something’s transmitted there. And it’s a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation. So we need to be true to who we are and remember what’s really important to us.

For a long time, I’ve culti­vated a personal theory of naming. It goes like this:

When you name something, you label the thing; frame it. This is an important job, before anyone has actually encoun­tered that thing! But, very quickly, the flow of meaning reverses. The thing’s specific char­ac­ter­is­tics and its performance — its great success, we hope — fill the vessel of its name, which was pretty empty all along. Instead of the name defining the thing, the thing (re)defines the name. This happens with companies, with works of art, with people themselves.

So, when naming something, while it’s important to choose an appealing label, it’s probably more important to choose a vessel of sufficient capacity.

The clock has no finished design and it has been made without any careful drawings or mathematical calculations. The pieces are only made if I can hold their details in my head as I make them, without reference to any set of external measures. I do make rough sketches of some parts as a path to understanding them, but never use these during the making of the parts. The clock gradually grows through trial and error and lots of physical work with metal, but out of this has come a set of principles of making that were not clear to me before doing the clock. I have finally realized that what I am actually making is a pattern of understandings of the process of making rather than the things that are actually being made.

To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.

A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the “best-of” DVD version of your free youtube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month. If you have roughly a thousand of true fans like this (also known as super fans), you can make a living — if you are content to make a living but not a fortune.

The advice I’ve received from those who are close to the center of this timeless way of building is to start small. Like with a piece of tile, or a tea tray. And to then imagine along with Christopher Alexander:

What it would be like
to live in a mental world
where one’s reasons
for making something
functionally
and one’s reasons
for making something
a certain shape,
or in a certain
ornamental way
are coming
from precisely
the same place
in you
.