Today’s software feels broken. Here’s how I want it to change.
A blank page is a hard thing to fill. You can’t take from a blank page. You can only give — give yourself to the page.
Giving yourself — your thoughts, dreams, labor, and love — to something, is the art of creation. Giving gives back in fulfillment and purpose.
What is beautiful is that the other side — receiving — is wonderful too. Accepting a gift given with a smile is joy. Buying a work of love proudly presented is too.
This dynamic is one we see rarely nowadays. Instead, we buy products designed to take advantage of us, because of ads telling us we are nothing without, both designed and engineered by workers exploited to maximize profits for the stocks we hold. Workers, who just want to survive in this cruel world of extraction, who don’t want to help exploit, but dream of maybe, just maybe one day getting the chance to give a bit of themselves to the world to make it better.
I’m a Software Engineer. I look at the devices I use every day, devices I helped create, and see how they drain me. How they drain the people around me. How so much of the software running on there is no longer aiding us, but constantly grabbing our attention, distracting us from what is actually important. Built to make us hyper-productive so we can exploit and be exploited at maximum speed. And some of this might not even be intentional. We just create more and more features. And then we advertise them. And we tell people that’s what they need. And then they use them. And then we all get overwhelmed. And nobody asked for it.
What can I still create without contributing to this overwhelm? I want to give myself to a blank page, but today’s operating systems are already three times painted over. They are full of offerings screaming “use me!”, making it impossible to find a calm place to go and create in peace. When is software a useful tool, and when is it too much?
A workbench that is covered in a mess of all the most useful tools is useless. I feel like that is where we are with software. It is time to tidy up the mess and start being intentional about what we actually want these machines to be for us. Transform them from a place of extraction to a place of giving. Make them a place where once in a while all that is offered is a blank page.