Notes on a side quest
I just concluded a brief 1-month series on my job’s mailing list about an unrelated topic.
The topic itself is complicated, and everybody is thinking about it for some reason, even though it really comes down to labor issues & tooling. We care a lot about labor issues, because those affect broader acceptance of our industry and our own pipeline; and less than zero about tooling, which constantly changes and will continue changing.
We also tend to be focused & driven when it comes to the topic of value-based design. We want people to learn what value-based design is, and then we want people to practice it. We want people to do this regardless of trend or tooling. We believe that this can be done regardless of trend or tooling.
Our point of view matters. People come to read us for it. Giant side quests are not really a good look for us, no matter how in-demand they may happen to be.
I mostly did this side quest in order to test the waters. Perhaps there really is appetite for the topic. Perhaps we can write about it in a way that still fits into our point of view. Now that would be interesting, right? And so that’s what we did. We didn’t tell you how to use the tool. We didn’t ragestroke against the tool existing, even though I really wanted to. It would have been nice to write about the labor issues, but others have done it better, and I don’t think I’m super qualified in the first place.
So we talked about how to respond to technology, how to see the thing for what it is, and stepped back a bit. Technologists do tech for a living. Doing tech is multidisciplinary by definition, and given the nature of this technology, most of us are going to end up doing tech first and specializing second. That feels interesting.
There is value to moving slowly before beginning a side quest like this. We could have written about all of this two years ago, but it would have been a lot more speculative & reactionary. Now that people really are doing stuff with the new tooling, we have something more concrete to respond to. I don’t believe this means we’ve “missed out” on anything. It means we’ve put thought into it. Remember when people put thought into things? That’s what we do here.
There is also value to stopping. I’ve said everything that needs to be said on the topic as of right now, and while I think the exercise was valuable, now it’s time to return back to design.