Ursula K Le Guin, on tech workers: “Real power goes to waste. Every wizard uses his art against the others, serving the men of greed. What good can any art be used that way? It’s wasted. It goes wrong, or it’s thrown away. Like slaves’ lives. Nobody can be free alone. Not even a mage. All of them working their magic in prison cells, to gain nothing. There’s no way to use power for good.”
– “The Finder”, from “Tales from Earthsea” (tooted by @jplebreton@mastodon.social)
Comment only what the code cannot say
- A comment is of zero (or negative) value if it is wrong.
- Don’t comment bad code -> rewrite it!
- Try to express as much as possible through code.
– Kevlin Henney (tweeted by Romano Roth)
Maybe this is what people mean when they tell us to “find our passion”, but that phrase seems pretty abstract to me. Maybe instead we should encourage people to find the hard problems they like to work on. Which problems do you want to keep working on, even when they turn out to be harder than you expected? Which kinds of frustration do you enjoy, or at least are willing to endure while you figure things out? Answers to these very practical questions might help you find a place where you can build an interesting and rewarding life.
If you keep your good ideas to yourself, they are useless; you could just as well have been doing crossword puzzles. Only by articulating your ideas and making them accessible through writing and talks do they become a contribution.
We go slow, because we make messes. Why do we make the mess? What drives us to make the mess in the first place? the desire to go fast.