Development quotes of the week

With a word or a gesture, we’re now able to summon invisible forces to do our bidding. Back in the day, they called these spells. Today, we call them user interfaces and digital systems. Somehow, though, we’ve lost something essential in that shift from fantasy to science fiction.

As technologists, we tend to be overly enamored of our technology. For us, the device too often becomes the end goal, and we lose track of the genuine human need that we might otherwise meet. We talk about “technology solutions” but lose track of the problem we’re trying to solve (or we create entirely new ones). A subtle shift in perspective will help us build the right things: let’s stop aiming to invent science fiction and start making magic instead.

When your phone heats up, you can change your grip or put it down to your desk. But when your ear computing device heats up, game over.

And your success is going to include a day when you see how we should be doing things better, not just with a new feature or a bugfix in the code, but in our processes, in how we're organizing and running the lab. I also deeply want for you to take the lessons you learn -- about how a group can organize itself to empower everyone, about seeing and hacking systems, about what scaffolding makes people more capable -- to the rest of your life, so you can be freer, stronger, a better leader, a disruptive influence in the oppressive and needless hierarchies you encounter. That's success too. You are part of our history and we are part of yours, even if you part ways with us, even if the project goes defunct.

The hardest bug I ever debugged in my life was a concurrency bug; the second hardest wasn't even close (and thankfully, I didn't try to solve it at the same time).