Artware

I often mull over the question of artistry and development in the dimmer parts of the night when my software designs feel especially uninspired or vapid. I find myself in an endless logical loop between two points:

1) Software exists to solve specific problems
2) Art exists to vaguely question

This simplification is, I think an accurate assessment of a logical hole in Steve Job’s explanation that Apple’s design is ‘the intersection between the liberal arts and technology.’ Something that is true only in so much that Apple designed software that solved artists problems. It wasn’t art itself.

The problem of abandonment and the value of endurance

When I found out HP was abandoning the hard work of the WebOS team by ditching its associated tablet my heart sank. When I then read on to see that HP was (dimly) lighting a future of consulting and enterprise technology I became infuriated. So many companies seem to quickly swerve with an intial product launch failure without calculating the brand destruction caused by such a brash action.

Every line in its right place

I live in a tiny house, its approximately 550 square feet and wonderful. I’ve lived in a lot of different homes over the course of my life, in many different places. I’ve inhabited sprawling suburban mansions, minuscule dorm rooms, cramped 300 square foot studios (with a roommate), and now in a microhouse. In most of those places I was disorganized, messy individual. It wasn’t until I acquired a brand new, well compartmentalized home that I began to get organized. And that did a funny thing to me, it started organizing my code too.