(This is a snapshot of my old weblog. New posts and selected republished essays can be found at raganwald.com.)
Thursday, July 22, 2004
If You Want To Write Software
This post was inspired by a chapter in Guy Kawasaki's book The Computer Curmudgeon. That chapter reprinted a magazine column he wrote that was inspired in turn by Brenda Ueland's book If You Want To Write.
Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express: don't worry about market share, customer needs, or the admiration of your peers. Ask yourself, "what is inside me straining to get out and manifest itself as a piece of software?"
Teachers, critics, parents and know-it-alls, when they see you have written something, become at once long-nosed and finicking and go through it gingerly sniffing out the flaws. AHA! a misspelled word! as though Shakespeare could spell!: It is not important that your code be well-formatted, refactored mercilessly, or even be entirely bug-free. It is only important that when you look back at what you have written, you can say with certainty: "that's what I was thinking of when I wrote it."
A great musician once told me that one should never play a single note without hearing it, feeling that it is true, thinking it beautiful: Everything you write should embody some great truth you hold dear. Ignore things you know in your heart to be false, such as integrations driven by Business Development, or features added to make your business plan more marketable.
Men spend their lives adding and subtracting and dictating letters when secretly they long to write sonnets and play the violin and burst into tears at the sunset: does the world need another XML-based, J2EE powered, SQL-Server? Or does it need Konfabulator, software so beautiful it inspires legions of admirers? What makes your heart beat? What would you write if you had hundreds of millions of dollars? Go ahead: write it anyways.
No writing is a waste of time,—no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good. It has stretched your understanding: during every development there comes the awful realization that nobody is going to want what you are building. Sometimes you are wrong and people will download your creation like hot cakes. Sometimes you are right and your software will pass unnoticed as the world careens down its crazy, unpredictable, unfair path. The thing is, it doesn't matter if your software changes the world. Writing it will change you for the better.
The moment I read Van Gogh's letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it: you and I think software has beauty, an aesthetic value, in both form and function. We have a sense of taste for software. Writing software is a way of sharing your feeling with the world, of telling the world what beauty means. Tell us! We want to know! We want, for one shining moment, to feel your love for your work.
At last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if they cared to hear it: thank you for reading this article. The words of others have helped me to explain how I feel about—how I've always felt about—writing software.
The quotations in bold are taken from Brenda's Book. If you'd like more inspiration, buy Guy's book The Macintosh Way, where he shares his feelings about beautiful software and beautiful companies.
This post was inspired by a chapter in Guy Kawasaki's book The Computer Curmudgeon. That chapter reprinted a magazine column he wrote that was inspired in turn by Brenda Ueland's book If You Want To Write.
Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express: don't worry about market share, customer needs, or the admiration of your peers. Ask yourself, "what is inside me straining to get out and manifest itself as a piece of software?"
Teachers, critics, parents and know-it-alls, when they see you have written something, become at once long-nosed and finicking and go through it gingerly sniffing out the flaws. AHA! a misspelled word! as though Shakespeare could spell!: It is not important that your code be well-formatted, refactored mercilessly, or even be entirely bug-free. It is only important that when you look back at what you have written, you can say with certainty: "that's what I was thinking of when I wrote it."
A great musician once told me that one should never play a single note without hearing it, feeling that it is true, thinking it beautiful: Everything you write should embody some great truth you hold dear. Ignore things you know in your heart to be false, such as integrations driven by Business Development, or features added to make your business plan more marketable.
Men spend their lives adding and subtracting and dictating letters when secretly they long to write sonnets and play the violin and burst into tears at the sunset: does the world need another XML-based, J2EE powered, SQL-Server? Or does it need Konfabulator, software so beautiful it inspires legions of admirers? What makes your heart beat? What would you write if you had hundreds of millions of dollars? Go ahead: write it anyways.
No writing is a waste of time,—no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good. It has stretched your understanding: during every development there comes the awful realization that nobody is going to want what you are building. Sometimes you are wrong and people will download your creation like hot cakes. Sometimes you are right and your software will pass unnoticed as the world careens down its crazy, unpredictable, unfair path. The thing is, it doesn't matter if your software changes the world. Writing it will change you for the better.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost
The moment I read Van Gogh's letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it: you and I think software has beauty, an aesthetic value, in both form and function. We have a sense of taste for software. Writing software is a way of sharing your feeling with the world, of telling the world what beauty means. Tell us! We want to know! We want, for one shining moment, to feel your love for your work.
At last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if they cared to hear it: thank you for reading this article. The words of others have helped me to explain how I feel about—how I've always felt about—writing software.
The quotations in bold are taken from Brenda's Book. If you'd like more inspiration, buy Guy's book The Macintosh Way, where he shares his feelings about beautiful software and beautiful companies.
Labels: passion
