As a technologist, you can recognize a wrong in the world. You can have a vision of what a better world could be. And you can dedicate yourself to fighting for a principle.
how do you go about defining yourself?
you have a choice.
define by craft (“I am an engineer”) VS define by principle/cause (“I believe idea death is unjust”)
in technical field, we are often not asked what we care about. we just do a craft. contrary to humanities, where the cause and root principle comes first, implementation / craft comes second.
finding your principle is a form of self-discovery. it takes time.
but then this principle will guide you.
by bret victor^
his principle is that ideas should not die. it brings pain to him if he sees them die.
and for this, creators need an immediate connection to what they’re creating.
so he works on eliminating delay between thinking and building upon it.
create ideas as you think of them
so he has been going about his life.
and every time he sees the principle being violated, he fixes it. all of his projects are just him fixing the violation of his principle. bc it is unjust.
and engineering is just one of the ways to go about it.
different ways of fixing and solving for the principle.
programming just happens to be one of the languages.
there was no interactivity back then.
animation is another way of communicating ideas
“And because ideas are so precious to me, when I see this principle violated, when I see ideas stillborn or stunted because their creator couldn’t see what they were doing, I feel that’s wrong.’
‘