Welcome to Developing Wisdom

How do you maintain professional integrity, agency, and craft excellence when working within systems that seem designed to prevent it?

Hey there friends.

I’ve been struggling to write this for weeks now. I have so much I want to share with you, and I tried so much to do this the “right” way, to follow best practices, emulate those I admire, to plan how I was going to bring clarity to my thoughts and share them with you. Using Claude, my favorite fabrication machine, I planned and planned and planned. I didn’t want to use the tool to write for me, however I have found value in using it as a sounding board to help me articulate the chaos in my head. I created outlines, I created a map, I drafted and discarded and refined and sound boarded and shifted and ultimately, every time I sat down to actually write out what I had planned, I was stuck. I stared at my outline, and it just didn’t resonate.

It didn’t feel like me, my thoughts, what I wanted to share.

This morning, as I lay in bed reflecting, partially trapped by the coziness, clarity slammed into place.

It didn’t feel like me because it’s not me. As much as I put in to trying to shape the outline, and articulate my thoughts, what was output was still just a mirror, still just a reflection of what I was trying to say through the lens of another, at a specific snapshot in time. I hesitate to say this is true of any conversation with another person, in that I don’t think it’s correct to give personhood to the fabrication machine. However, it is an accurate concept for this purpose.

A relationship exists between you and every single everything in the universe. You are part of a system, which is part of a system, which is part of a system, and so on. The interactions between you and the other parts of the system create emergent behaviors, emergent patterns. That emergence is inherently not you. It’s shaped by you, it would not exist without you, but it’s still an entirely new and separate thing that’s dependent on that interaction with another part. That’s really cool, right? You can think of this as something as big as collaborating on a project with another person, creating something together you could not have created independently, that contains parts of both of you, or as simple as your breath, your relationship and interaction with the atmosphere of where you exist. You breathe in the air, your body changes it into something else, and you exhale something entirely different. (Some might say breathing is the “big” thing, in truth, not the “small” thing, and they would be entirely correct as well).

What was being created and planned for this blog was an emergence between two parts of a system at a specific point in time. It’s not that it’s without value, it certainly holds no moral weight (it’s not “bad” or “wrong”), and it definitely helped me with gaining clarity on my thoughts, which ultimately was part of the goal.

Ultimately, though, it’s not me, and my success, such as it is, has always come from walking my own path, from being fully my authentic, messy, imperfect and fallible self, and not following a plan created by any other entity. I needed to be able to incorporate my daily learning, who I am today, my newest experiences and shifting of my understanding as living, experiencing being.

What does this have to do with Developing Wisdom? Well, it’s part of the whole. What I envision Developing Wisdom to be is a way to help shape the conversation we as developers, as technologists are having about the ways we envision, build, and implement technology. I want to help shine a light on the realities of development and the people who are trying to do their best in imperfect ecosystems. I want to help give practical, realistic advice on how to shape your workflows, shift the constraints, support others, and find accomplishment in what we build, even if it doesn’t follow idealistic best practices. I want to wrap in conversations about agency, craft excellence, personal growth, community, and taking an active role in shaping humanity’s future.

I want to do all of this with you, in all our imperfect, unplanned, messy, fallible way of being; iterating and building on what we know and who we are, shaped by our daily lives.

I don’t have all the answers, and I will make mistakes or missteps in what I share. I have the experience and insights gained from the life that I have lived, from the knowledge I have now, and the understanding that with every tiny space of existence this shifts and changes, and we are all doing what we can to do good imperfectly. Together, as parts of the whole system, we can create an emergence that brings us new information, new considerations, and new wisdom.

Thanks for listening, friends, and I look forward to talking with you.

If you’re seeing this for the second time, I learned about publications today! :D Find Developing Wisdom here, instead of my main profile. :)