Building With Soul

Quality software deserves your hard‑earned cash Quality software from independent makers is like quality food from the farmer’s market. A jar of handmade organic jam is not the same as mass-produced corn syrup-laden jam from the supermarket. Industrial fruit jam is filled with cheap... See more

We can build software to eat the world, or software to feed it. And if we are going to feed it, it will require a different approach to design, one which optimizes for a different type of growth, and one that draws upon—and rewards—the humility of the designers who participate within it.

The problem with the Lean Startup as a mindset is that it leads to a Minimal Viable Life. And I know many people feel like they’re living one these days. The Lean startup is a mental model that is ultimately not helpful for human flourishing. There are metaphysical, creative, and moral issues with it.

If you consider yourself a technologist, here’s your imperative: build things that are unabashedly, beautifully tangled into all else in life — people and relationships, politics, emotion and pain, understanding or the lack thereof, being alone, being together, homesickness, adventure, victory, loss. Build things that come alive, and drag... See more

If you know to look, you can feel the difference between software crafted with care for its users and systems of vacuous tradition that just happen to be good at producing the vapid fodder of convenience.