Artisanal software

In a speech delivered years ago, Ev Williams used agriculture as a metaphor to understand what’s possible on the Internet.

Agriculture was a tremendous invention – it got people fed and freed them to do many things. But agriculture – taken to the extreme in the pursuit of profit leads to a sick and obese population and industrial... See more

Think of it as a spectrum. Things we dump into private WhatsApp group chats, DMs, and cavalier Tweet threads are part of our chaos streams - a continuous flow of high noise / low signal ideas. On the other end we have highly performative and cultivated artefacts like published books that you prune and tend for years. Gardening sits in the middle. I... See more

In a sense, software is much more like a garden than a mechanical entity like a car. We plant the initial seeds (start designing and building), water and nurture it (make updates and enhance features), and periodically have to prune (refactor) and weed (remove bugs and vulnerabilities). A product requires constant attention to grow and adapt to its... See more