You know what rocks? Making things.

From a sort of “spiritual fulfilment” perspective, I think the thing is probably less important than the making. Making things converts the raw resources of life — time, energy, thus food, water, the heat of the Sun, fresh tears in your very muscle fibres — into a manifestation of your will. Heady stuff.

I’m at something of a career crossroads, having spent most of a decade being a data person, and having more recently realized that the work I find most fulfilling is creative. I like it so much, maybe I want to change career to do more making and less data-ing.

To that end, I recently spent three months making software as a participant in The Recurse Center. I focussed mostly on front end, using the Svelte framework. Some things I made:

• An app for internal navigation (currently offline), which uses large language models, and a combobox that was tortuous to implement.
• A small tool for understanding binary classifier performance (currently offline), which is a kind of exploration of a bigger idea I’m toying with.
• A bar chart maker (currently offline), which I built for a workshop I gave on Svelte.
• A game of life, with ghosts (currently offline), which was just a fun noodle.

In the course of spending a couple of months doing mostly front end, I learned that I definitely do not want to pivot my career into being the kind of developer whose work is a procession of tickets to turn someone else’s Figma file into a working site.

On the flip side, I very much affirmed my desire to make things humans can use. I created things, and put them on the internet, and now you can use them. That’s power, right there. A couple of people told me they actually used the Emotinomicon — something I had conceived of as a fun toy — as a real tool. Extremely cool.

Making things is deep magick. There’s an evolutionary thread from my being to the collective primordial soul of humanity, and making things plucks at it.