It Changes Fast

I feel like there’s more cool software (useful, creative, well-designed, beautiful, etc) coming out every day than I ever remember. It’s strange that I also feel a bit… tired, or confused at times?

A few years ago I feel the industry didn’t really care about experience if you’re great at programming. An engineer can pretty much figure anything out in a new field within a few weeks-months, and by that time you’re an expert—that’s good enough. General coding knowledge is enough. Most software, companies (think Figma) took years of being small to build before they could scale; a bit of learning was part of the plan.

But I think, with everything going so fast now, timelines are shifting from years to months to weeks. There’s a pressure to be productive earlier, and even those few weeks of on-ramp on any given thing hurt execution speed. I hear more conversations about “have they done it before” rather than “how can we do something amazing?” — the predictability is sought after.

Meanwhile, software is getting written so quickly, sometimes I’d just like to take a step back from all of this and return a year later.

What we do should be in service to people; computers are how we learn, work together, create and collaborate, and software is how we create interactive media for people to discover. I’d like to continue being hopeful and drawing inspiration from these foundations. We’re really lucky, getting to create these digital artifacts that strike new wonder every day! No matter how industry or tools move.