Werd I/O

Expensify’s experiment to use craft coffees and a free cocktail bar to lure employees back to the office failed spectacularly:

If the best office in the entire planet can't compete with the local coffee shop, the tightly-closed Pandora's box of "work from anywhere" has burst open, and will never be resealed. No amount of begging or coercion is going to work in the long run: the businesses that demand it are fighting a losing war of attrition against an infinite universal energy. You heard it here folks: the office is dead.

This isn’t where every company has ended up on this issue. Most large tech companies in particular are demanding a return to the office, for a few reasons.

The first, although not the main reason, is that a lot of very large companies have real estate portfolios that are now sitting mostly-empty, which will drive down prices when leases come up for renewal, in turn jeopardizing the value of commercial real estate holdings. (Boo hoo.)

The second is a belief — more religious than fact-based — that workers are more productive in the office than if they work from home. (Research tends to show the opposite.)

And the third is ostensibly about company culture:

In a 2022 Korn Ferry survey of 15,000 global executives, two-thirds agreed that corporate culture accounts for more than 30% of their company’s market value. Many leaders, the report notes, believe that a strong culture can only be established and maintained “if everyone is — at least some of the time — occupying the same workplace.”

Culture is important — the core issue on most teams — and I’ll come back to that issue. There’s a subtext here, too, about power. The essential flip is between an employer-controlled environment and a worker-controlled environment. In the former, employees can be observed and their behavior influenced. In the latter, not so much.

This balance of power, at least for knowledge workers, is what has flipped forever. Nobody’s willingly going back to an environment of predominant employer control — at least not without significant concessions.

I wrote a flippant post on Mastodon:

You really want to get people back to the office? Forget free cocktails. Think free daycare, six month parental leave, 25 days vacation + holidays, extensive carer benefits for those who need them, the expectation that you’ll stay home and rest rather than work if you’re sick, flexible hours, further help with the enormous cost of living in the cities you operate in.

Oh, and test and require vaccination proof for everyone.

The response was really strong. Americans overwhelmingly responded with, “Yes! And also retrofit offices to have better ventilation.” Europeans, meanwhile, overwhelmingly responded with, “This would actually be an erosion of my rights; aim higher.” — a good reminder that the working conditions Americans are used to are not the norm virtually anywhere else in the world.

The crux of what I was trying to say is that the balance of power has been in favor of employers; working from home has been much-needed freedom for employees (albeit granted by necessity rather than benevolence). It’s still not truly in balance, and the benefits I discussed should be provided regardless of whether a workforce works from home or from the office — but if a full return to office is on the table, worker benefits, rights, and protections should be too.

And that’s the crux of changes to company culture, too. When employers say “culture” they often mean “norms”: when people show up for work, how they dress, notions of professed work ethic, and so on. These are all cultural elements that benefit the office. But there are also “softer” cultural elements that are a hard requirement for functioning well as a community in any context, that are even more important when workers are not in constant contact with each other.

In a remote environment, communication skills, inclusion, empathy, feeling supported, and connectedness all become vital. It’s easy to feel isolated or unsupported when you’re working from your kitchen table and conversations need to be scheduled video calls. It’s easy to not know what’s happening, understand the team’s goals, or not realize that your colleague is having a hard time this week and isn’t able to be fully present. Many of these things were implicit and unspoken when everyone was in the same room. Not addressing them explicitly was already to the detriment of a company’s culture; it was never optional. But now that everyone is distributed, its importance is amplified.

It turns out that very few employers know how to adapt to that.

It’s worth considering ideas of formal and informal communication in work contexts. Everyone knows that the real benefits at work-related conferences aren’t the sessions, but the hallway track: the conversations people informally have on the side. In my early-career work in higher education, I used to argue that learning was dependent on friendship and study groups that are formed at colleges: the informal spaces where people learn and share knowledge together.

Relationships and ambient information are built in workplaces in the same way. Building a company culture is a lot like building any community. Everyone needs to feel supported, through both hard actions (providing inclusive benefits, tools, processes, policies) and soft gestures (trust, openness, vulnerability, transparency, empathy). There need to be spaces for reflection, and there has to be room for being messily human. Everyone has to feel valued because they are valued, both in word and action. And in turn, it turns out that having increased power, agency, connectedness, support, and trust will make them happier and more productive.

There are tools for this, but they’re different tools. I believe strongly in journaling inside a company, for example: a way of modeling transparent communication, quiet reflection, and vulnerability. The best place I’ve seen this work is Medium, which has a private version of its site (called Hatch) run as an intranet for employees. It’s a beautiful space that runs the gamut from engineering specs to personal introductions and introspection. As Marcin Wishary wrote a few years ago:

It’s so good it feels like a perk. It forces us to be thoughtful about our product and about our company. It makes everyone a better writer/explainer/storyteller. It keeps the relevant ideas and thoughts afloat, as they don’t just die in individual mailboxes.

It’s not a surprise that when the then-CTO of Medium moved on, it was to found Range, a sort of operating system for team communication.

These are hundreds of similar ideas — some of them formal tools, some of them informal practices — that can help with building a strong remote team culture. It’s completely possible, if employers can bring themselves to understand that they have to do the work, and to internalize Expensify’s finding that the previous status quo is never coming back.

No matter which way you cut it or which tools you use, remote work does depend on trust in your employees, more devolved power and distributed equity, high transparency, and great, bi-directional communication. If those are challenging to an organization, there just might be deeper problems that need to be addressed.

ProPublica is hiring a senior web developer.

You’re familiar with ProPublica’s reporting even if you’re not sure about the name. They’re the newsroom that reported on Justice Clarence Thomas’s close relationship with GOP megadonor Harlan Crow; on TurboTax’s misleading practices that coerce low income tax filers into paying for its product; on Illinois schools collaborating with local police to issue tickets for minor misbehavior. It’s won major journalism prizes including the Pulitzer, had an outsize impact on American democracy, and shown the way for non-profit news.

The product team is a small group of creative technologists that provide the website, data, and infrastructure platform for this journalism to be published. It’s a remote team (although applicants must be in the United States) with an option to be in-person in New York City. Go apply here and say I sent you.

I kind of miss having something like a LiveJournal.

If you missed its heyday about twenty years ago, LiveJournal was a private blogging community that led to much of what we know as social media. You could follow your friends, and they could follow you back if they wanted; your posts could be shared with the whole world, just with your friends, or with a subset. Every post could host thriving, threaded discussions. You could theme your journal extensively, making it your own. And while you could post photos and other media, it was unapologetically optimized for long-form text. The fact that the whole codebase was also open sourced, paving the way for Dreamwidth and other downstream communities, didn’t hurt at all. Brad Fitzpatrick, its founder, went on to build a stunning number of important web building blocks.

There’s no other service I’ve found that allows you to write in long-form in a private space that you share with your friends. Instagram might be the closest in some ways: it’s turned into a more interesting, introspective social network than most. But I’m better with words than with pictures, and I miss that quiet, shared reflection.

Public social networks force us to use a different facet of our identities. In a private space with your friends, nobody really cares about your job, and nobody’s hustling to promote whatever it is they’re working on. Twitter nudged social networking into becoming a space for marketing and brands, which is a ball the new Twitter-a-likes have picked up and carried. Much like the characters from The Breakfast Club, each of the new Twitters has its own stereotypical niche: the nerds, the brands, the rich people, the journalists. But they all feel a little bit like people are trying to sell ideas to you all of the time.

Like many people on social media, I’m constantly sharing links to things I’m worried about, or things I’ve written, or things I’m working on. The underlying numbers are important. Is what I’m writing resonating with people? Are people subscribing? There’s an underlying neurosis to it that isn’t very healthy — and it’s this neurosis that also leads to blogging FOMO, where you feel like you have to keep pushing out content otherwise you’ll lose people. I know that influencers (the modern internet’s far better-looking answer to bloggers) also feel this acutely.

Not everything has to be about building a brand or a following. It can just be about reflecting, or sharing something with your friends. Private spaces allow us to be weird, unvarnished, and vulnerable in a way that’s harder for most people if they think the world could be watching. On the public web, everyone is their own little media publisher. In private, we’re just us. The former creates an enforced distance — almost a mask — between writer and reader. The latter is intimacy.

How can we reclaim some of that humanity from our social spaces? Should that even be a goal? I can’t decide, but I do know I miss it. I think what that really means is that I miss when the web felt like it was about making a genuine, reflective connection with other people — and it most often doesn’t anymore.

I’m looking for new adventures! These might be:

• A full-time position
• A paid board or advisory position
• A long-term contract

Maybe there’s a me-shaped hole in your organization! Let’s talk.

What do I do?

I’m an experienced technology leader and strategist with an engineering background.

I’ve spent years working in leadership teams, including:

• Chief Technology Officer at startups and non-profit newsrooms
• Director of Investments at an early-stage startup accelerator
• Co-founder and first developer of one of the first open source social networking platforms and an open source publishing platform, both of which were acquired

Alongside this, I also:

• Taught equitable product design to newsrooms as part of Open Matter and the Newmark School’s Product Immersion for Small Newsrooms
• Served as the Geek in Residence at the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab
• Was a senior engineer at Medium, a top 100 website, where I also co-founded the openness circle and co-led workshops into responses to the 2016 election
• Have been an active member of the indieweb community, advocating for a vibrant, diverse, independent web
• Open sourced a rubric for making technology decisions

You can learn more about my career background on my LinkedIn profile.

What am I looking for?

I want to work with collaborative, empathetic, inclusive teams that are using technology to make the world better — or are advising mission-driven organizations about their use of technology.

We might be a great fit if:

• You need someone who can create a product vision and execute on it
• You’re looking for a leader with a technical background who can create a supportive, productive team culture
• You’re looking for someone to advise on technology or startup strategy
• You want to stay on top of technology trends and assess emerging opportunities
• You need someone to help hire a great technology team
• You’ve enjoyed my writing here and believe these ideas would be useful in your organization

Or all of the above! I would also strongly consider teaching or research positions.

What am I not looking for?

We’re not a great fit if:

• You work with the military of any nation
• You’re primarily looking for a software engineer (although I love coding in the context of the work listed above)
• You’re an all-male or all-White team

I also only take remote-first positions, although I am willing to travel into the office or to customers from time to time. I can work in the United States without need for a visa or sponsorship.

How can I get in touch?

Email me at ben@werd.io to organize a chat. I’m looking forward to meeting you!

There are two ways to use GPS navigation in a car:

The first is to use the directions as gospel. The system has found the right path for you to take; you need to follow them if you’re going to get to your destination.

The second is as a kind of North Star. The navigation will always point you towards your destination, but you know that you don’t have to follow the directions: if you choose to take one street instead of another, or take a detour, the system will adapt and find another way to go.

In the first scenario, the computer tells you what to do. In the second, it’s there to advise you, but the decisions are yours.

The first may get you there faster, if the systems’s model of the streets and traffic around you matches reality to an adequate degree. We’ve all discovered road closures or one-way streets that weren’t represented on-screen. By now, most people are familiar with the practical implications of Alfred Korzybski’s reminder that the map is not the territory even if they haven’t encountered the work itself. The computer’s knowledge of the street and its traffic is made of city plans, scans from specially equipped cars, road sensors, and data from geolocated phones of people in the area. While this collection of data points is very often adequate, much is left out: the model is not the territory.

But even if the model were accurate, the second method may be the most satisfying. A GPS system doesn’t have whims; it can’t say, “that street looks interesting” and take a detour down it, or choose to take an ocean drive. The first method gets you there most efficiently, but the second allows you to make your own way and take creative risks without worrying about getting completely lost. Sometimes you dowant to get completely lost — or, at least, I do — and then there’s no need to have the GPS switched on at all. You find new places, the second way; you discover new streets; you explore and learn about a neighborhood. You engage your emotions.

One way to think about the current crop of AI tools is as GPS for the mind. They can be used to provide complete instructions, or they can be used as a kind of North Star to glance at for suggestions when you need a helping hand. Their model isn’t always accurate, and therefore their suggestions aren’t always useful.

If you use AI for complete instructions — to tell you what to do, or to create a piece of work or a translation — you likely will get something that works, but it’ll be the blandest route possible. Prose will be prosaic; ideas will not be insightful. The results will be derived from the average of the mainstream. Sometimes you’ll need to adjust the output in the same way you need to drive around a closed road that GPS doesn’t know about. But the output will probably be something you can use and it’ll be more or less fine.

If you use AI as a kind of advisor, you’re still in control: your creativity has the wheel. You have agency and can take risks. What you’ll make as a human won’t be the average of a data corpus, so it’ll be inherently more interesting, and very likely more insightful. But you might find that a software agent can unstick you if you run into trouble, and gently show you a possible direction to go in. It’s a magic feather.

I worry about incentives. For many, they will be used to instruct or replace our decision-making faculties, rather than as a tool we can use while remaining in control. Software can be used to democratize and distribute power, or it can be used by the powerful to entrench their dominance and disenfranchise others. So it is with AI: the tools can aid creativity and augment agency, or they can be used to prescribe and control. I have no doubt that they will often be used for the latter.

There was a story that Google Maps intentionally routed people driving south from San Francisco on US Route 101, an objectively terrible stretch of highway, leaving the parallel and far more pleasant Interstate 280 free for its employees. It’s kind of funny but not actually true, as far as I know; still, because Google Maps navigation is a black box, they could have done it without anyone realizing it was on purpose. Nobody would need to know. All benefit would be to the owners of the system.

GPS isn’t only used by human drivers. Take a stroll around San Francisco or a few other major cities and you’ll notice fleets of driverless taxis, which use a combination of GPS, sensor arrays, and neural networks to make their way around city streets. Here, there’s no room for whim, because there’s no human to havewhims. There’s just an integrated computer system, creating instructions and then following them.

Unlike many people, I’m not particularly worried about AI replacing peoples’ jobs, although employers will certainly try and use it to reduce their headcount. I’m more worried about it transforming jobs into roles without agency or space to be human. Imagine a world where performance reviews are conducted by software; where deviance from the norm is flagged electronically, and where hiring and firing can be performed without input from a human. Imagine models that can predict when unionization is about to occur in a workplace. All of this exists today, but in relatively experimental form. Capital needs predictability and scale; for most jobs, the incentives are not in favor of human diversity and intuition.

I also have some concerns about how this dehumanization may apply life beyond work. I worry about how, as neural network models become more integrated into our lives and power more decisions that are made about us, we might find ourselves needing to conform to their expectations. Police departments and immigration controllers are already trying to use AI to make predictions about a person’s behavior; where these systems are in use, their fate is largely at the hands of a neural network model, which in turn is subject to the biases of its creators and the underlying datasets it operates upon. Colleges may use AI to aid with admissions; schools may use it to grade. Mortgage providers may use AI to make lending decisions and decide who can buy a house. Again, all of this is already happening, at relatively low, experimental levels; it’s practically inevitable that these trends will continue.

I see the potential for this software-owned decision-making to lead a more regimented society, where sitting outside the “norm” is even more of a liability. Consider Amazon’s scrapped automated hiring system for software developers, which automatically downgraded anyone it thought might be a woman.

Leaving aside questions of who sets those norms and what they are, I see the idea of a norm at all as oppressive in itself. A software engine makes choices based on proximity to what it considers to be ideal. Applying this kind of thinking to a human being inherently creates an incentive to become as “normal” as possible. This filtering creates in-groups and out-groups and essentially discards groups the software considers to be unacceptable. If the software was a person or a political movement, we’d have a word for this kind of thinking.

Using AI to instruct and make decisions autonomously does not lead to more impartial decisions. Instead, it pushes accountability for bias down the stack from human decision-making to a software system that can’t and won’t take feedback, and is more likely to be erroneously cast as impartial, even when its heuristics are dangerously dystopian.

I like my GPS. I use it pretty much every time I drive. But it’s not going to make the final decision about which way I go.

I appreciate using AI software agents as a way to check my work or recommend changes. I like it when software tells me I’ve made a spelling mistake or added an errant comma.

I do not, under any circumstances, want them running our lives.

I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable with how links show up on this site, and their intersection with longer-form blog posts. Last night I made a few adjustments:

1. Blog posts and links on the site now have the same font size, resetting the information architecture to display them as equals.
2. Link posts more clearly show that their title is a link to the external page.
3. Link posts will be more “bloggy”: longer descriptions with more of a focus on my reaction to them. It's not enough to share a link; the bar should be that you know why I think it’s interesting and what my perspective on it is.

Because of their blogginess, I’m going to stop aggregating them together into monthly “notable articles” pages. They’re effectively blog posts in themselves, and nobody wants to reread posts you’ve already published.

You will, however, still be able to view links and fully-fledged blog posts on separate index pages (with their own RSS feeds) if you prefer.

I thought it would be interesting to detail some of my day-to-day setup, Uses This style. This week I'm completely independent, so I'm only using my own hardware and software, which feels like a good time to take stock. This is my stack - I'd love to read yours!

Previously; also see the baby stack.

Hardware

My main computer is a 2020 Mac Mini with an M1 chip, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB disk. I use an LG 32" QHD IPS HDR10 monitor, the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and Numeric Keypad, and Magic Trackpad. I have zero complaints.

My webcam is a Razer Kiyo Pro, which is kind of overkill, but far better than the cheap Logitech model I used to use.

For traveling, I still use a 13” 2020 MacBook Pro (1TB drive, 16GB RAM). I have an iPad Pro with Pencil that’s mostly for reading these days, not for lack of trying: the Magic Keyboard feels nice but the lag is incredibly noticeable with many apps. I’d originally intended the iPad to be for creative work but it was not to be.

I own a Fujifilm XT-4 mirrorless camera, which I bought when our son was born, but the truth is that I mostly take photos on my iPhone. I have the iPhone Pro Max 15 in Titanium, which I got on the upgrade program. I plan to let that expire this year and stick with this phone for a while.

After a bunch of trial and error with headsets (and getting an ear infection from the AirPods Pro), I use AirPods Max. The audio quality is incredible, but the microphone is just so-so. I have a Blue Yeti mic that I bought for podcasting years ago and have considered hooking that up.

I’ve got a Sonos Five in my office and in various larger rooms in my house (with the microphone function disabled). I’ve augmented with a bunch of Sonos One SLs (which don’t have a microphone at all).

I decided I needed a printer in my office so I bought a Brother HL-L2350DW wireless duplex laser printer. You can’t go wrong with Brother, but it must be said that wireless printing longer documents doesn’t work perfectly with newer versions of macOS unless you use the slightly awkward desktop application, which only takes PDFs.

I have a Fully Jarvis standing desk with the balance board and sit on a grey SitOnIt Wit task chair.

My TV is a Samsung 65" TU700D 4K Crystal UHD HDR Smart TV driven by an AppleTV, which I prefer to any other set top box I’ve tried. I studiously ignore the built-in Samsung OS.

I drive a 2021 Tesla Model 3, which I don’t think there’s an excuse for given Musk’s shenanigans and the company’s cavalier approach. My plan is to trade it in for a Volkswagen ID. Buzz as soon as they’re available in the US. I’m hardline about never going back to driving a gas car.

Software

I use macOS Ventura on my desktop but have upgraded my laptop to Sonoma. I’m not going to pretend that I can see much of a difference.

My default web browser is Arc, which I completely love. I read email in Superhuman, which is too expensive but really does make email easier for me. Lately I’ve taken to using the stock macOS / iOS calendar app with all of my various work and personal calendars aggregated into one interface.

I start my day by reading my feeds in Reeder, connected to my NewsBlur account.

I still use Spotify to listen to music, and have it connected to my car and the Sonos system. I use Brain.fm for binaural music that helps me focus and Libro.fm for audiobooks.

I code using VSCode, like almost everyone. I keep my Jetbrains license current, so I can always go back. My code is almost all hosted on GitHub, but I have some very old Known-related repositories on Bitbucket. I use iTerm2 as my terminal client and depend heavily on Homebrew.

I probably don’t need this many text editors. Blog posts are written in iA Writer. Long-form work like my book is written in Ulysses. I keep BBEdit around as a scratchpad and for text manipulation tasks. I’ve got Notion for private notes / bookmarks and Obsidian for public notes. I have Microsoft Word for very boring use cases (legal documents, my resumé).

I track time on freelance contracts using Toggl and manage my invoices using Wave.

My personal Mastodon instance is hosted with Masto.host and I use Ivory as my client. My website (running Known, of course) is hosted on Digital Ocean and sits behind a Cloudflare CDN. It uses Plausible Analytics.

It’s impossibly hard to watch coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. Thousands of people on both sides of the border have been killed (1,300 in Israel, 2,000 in Gaza at the time of writing); the stories that have emerged are brutal. What is known to be true seems to be different day by day.

What’s been notable for me has been the level of bloodthirst I’ve seen across social media. One Instagram account on my feed that has traditionally covered social justice topics openly cheered on Hamas’s attacks, declaring that decolonization always required violence. I unfollowed. In turn, I saw lots of discussion on Threads in particular by people who wanted to see Gaza — one of the most densely-populated areas on the planet — bombed to the ground such that there would be nobody left.

In the midst of this armchair warmongering, people are missing their loved ones. It’s a real conflict, in the context of decades of history, in which real people are being killed in terrible ways as I write this. But social media has reduced it to video game dimensions; online discussions rip it of context and turn it into performative posturing that has been largely devoid of the underlying human tragedy. Missing family members; footage of bodies in ice cream freezers; wounded children. All of these have become atoms of content to be shared and reshared in order to build social media clout.

Over on X, this dehumanization of the conflict has become particularly pronounced because of the platform’s endeavor to pay users based on social engagement. The incentive is to post shocking content that will be commented on and reshared virally, because it will lead directly to revenue for the poster. Inevitably, a lot of this content takes footage that isn’t even from this conflict and relabels it. A patchwork of pictures and video drawn from across recent history that evoke feelings about this conflict, all thrown together so someone can make a buck (or, in some cases, tens of thousands of bucks). Whereas a blue checkmark used to indicate that a user is notable in their field, you can now buy one for $8 a month. It can be next to impossible to determine what is real.

But it would be a mistake to say that this is happening on X in isolation. Even when social media posts don’t lead directly to revenue, everyone is in the clout game. More followers can lead to more cumulative engagement which can lead to more opportunities to sell in the future. Very few real brands — McDonald’s or Starbucks, say — would post so recklessly about the conflict (which is not to say they are ethical actors in other ways; it’s also worth saying that McDonald’s has donated to both sides of the conflict, and that Starbucks denounced a message of solidarity with Palestine that was published by its union). But everyone’s a personal brand now. Social media has become a literal marketplace of ideas, where peoples’ attention is drawn and monetized. And in this environment of clout and virality, no extra value is placed on truth.

None of this is exactly new. Media management has been a part of every conflict since at least the Second World War. Some disinformation from that period — carrots helping you see in the dark, for example — was absorbed so readily that it has simply become a part of our culture. In this conflict, both sides were surely aware of how footage would be played in the media. What’s different now to 80 years ago is that everyone is the media. We all have spheres of influence, and it’s not unheard of for a middle manager with an axe to bear to have more of an audience than a national newspaper with a complete set of reporters and fact-checkers. Most of our news is consumed in stackable, decontextualized pieces through our connections to individuals who we perceive to share similar opinions to us, delivered in such a way as to maximize engagement with advertisements and keep us on the platform.

None of which connects us to the underlying humanity of the people who suffer in this, or any, conflict. It disconnects us from the fact that civilians have been targeted, which is a war crime. It disconnects us from the need for the killing to stop.

This isn’t a game. It’s not like supporting a sports team. It’s not blue and black / white and gold dress. Regardless of the particulars of the war, the side we should all be on is that of preserving lives and creating a safe, inclusive, democratic environment for future generations. In a world where attention is money, it doesn’t feel like that’s where the incentives lie today.

I have a lot of admiration for Eliot Peper, who has spun a career in tech into a career in writing science fiction novels rooted in the intersection of technology and society. They’re fun reads, first and foremost, but there’s always an insight into how technology is made, and what that means for the rest of us.

His latest, Foundry, is a kind of spy novel about semiconductors that takes you on a knockabout ride before arriving at a satisfying conclusion that could — if he wanted — be the start of a series that I would happily read. Along the way, small details betray an interest in just about everything. (I particularly appreciated a discussion of how people of partial-Indonesian descent are treated in the Netherlands.) His books are very much in the tradition of pageturners by authors like Michael Crichton and John Grisham. I’ve enjoyed them a lot.

One of the reasons I admire Eliot’s work is that this is absolutely where I want to take my life, too. Writing was always my first love: there was a Sliding Doors decision point where I could have chosen an English / journalism or computer science route. Despite a career in technology that has taken me to some interesting places, it’s a testament to that original love that I still don’t know if I picked the right path.

I ended up going into computers specifically because the nascent web was so perfect for storytelling. My computer science degree has been a useful bedrock for my work in software, but there was far less exploration of computing in intersection with the humanities (or any kind of humanity at all) than I would have liked. Over the last few years I’ve allowed myself to pursue my original interest, and it’s been rewarding. Lately, I’ve been getting 1:1 mentorship through The Novelry, which has helped me to overcome some imposter syndrome and put a more robust shape to the plot I’m working on. Eventually, I’d like to try for a creative writing MA, once I can demonstrate that I’m more than some computer guy.

I’ve been lucky to have people in my life who have made a living through writing stories. (I wrote about this recently with respect to opening up possibilities for our son.) My childhood friend Clare’s dad was the author and Tolkien biographer Humphrey Carpenter. I remember being enthralled that he could sit and write stories for a living. I was similarly enthralled, years later, when my cousin Sarah became a wildly successful young adult author. (She’s just started blogging again, and it’s quite lovely and worth subscribing to.) They demonstrated that it’s possible. It’s reductive to say that you’ve just got to sit down and do it — there is a craft here, which needs practice and attention — but that is, indeed, the first step, for them and every writer.

Giving myself the permission to just sit and do that has been difficult. Blogging is second nature for me: I can take an open box on the web, pour out my thoughts, and hit publish. An intentional long-form work requires a leap of faith, a great deal more craft and editing, and significantly less of a dopamine rush from people commenting and re-sharing. It’s possible that nobody else will see what I’ve written for years. It’s equally possible that it’s terrible and very few other people will ever see it. But I’ve decided that giving myself permission to sit down and write means giving myself permission to fail at it. In turn, I’ll learn from that failure and try again, hopefully writing something better the next time. I do want it to be a work that other people enjoy, but there’s also value in allowing myself to create without needing an immediate follow-up.

In the meantime, I have huge admiration for people like Sarah, Eliot, and Humphrey, who gave themselves the space and cultivated the dedication to write.

You should check out Eliot’s work and go subscribe to Sarah’s blog.

Now, onto today’s word count.