Make something wonderful

If you're following this blog, you're probably the type of reader who creates things.

You find joy in taking atoms—or the digital representation of them—and pushing against entropy. It's your mission in life to bring pieces together (alright, that's a little over the top, but making cool stuff is important to you); against the desire of the universe which tends toward distance and separation.

We're fast approaching a world where everything is being quantified, enumerated, and marked with a dollar price based on its perceived value in the marketplace. That's fine, to a point. Understanding what something is worth is useful. But you cannot moneyball your way into deciding a price for everything.

Enshittification exists. It's frustrating, and it's everywhere. You like something? It's probably going to get worse as it tries to monetize. Eventually the bean counters come for everything (and I know some of you and love you, you have a place too! Just not everywhere, all at once) and decide that your thing belongs in a specific column in a spreadsheet.

Years ago I didn't get this. I didn't understand that the art I wanted to create, the designs I hoped to envision and bring to the world—all this magic I saw in my head and wrestled into life—wasn't appreciated by everyone the same way I saw it. Some people I worked with got the vision, and let me run with my dreams, to pursue the ideas I had with the proper constraints, but without predetermining the exact dollar value it'd likely bring. I'll be forever grateful to them for believing in me and giving me a chance, even when I wasn't even sure of myself.

We need people who want to create, we need you to care and pour yourself into making something beautiful.

CAC, LTV, EBIDTA, and a dozen other acronyms and initialisms—all these are ways that we've tried to quantity how much a customer is worth, how much a company can earn, how a business should exist. That's all good, and necessary. But not everything can be quantified and operate within this realm. Some things need to exist for their own reasons.

Gruber has been talking about dickovers this week, how someone deep in the bowels of an organization must have decided that the right popup would move numbers in the right way—and sure they're right. You can see in the metrics that people bought more or used a thing more as a result. YouTube thumbnails work for a reason. They're horrible, but they boost numbers.

It feels now like every app we use is begging for your attention. Even the operating systems are not immune to this. Popups, notifications, alerts, software update notices, pings, pops, badges, banners. It's exhausting. If you work with software for a living, you cannot go a single day without some app grabbing your precious attention and letting you know that there's something you absolutely must pay attention to—something that is so important its going to derail what you were originally hoping to get done.

I've been logged out of LinkedIn for almost a year now. I'm trying to break my habit of social media, so I keep the password in an Apple Note locked behind another password. Trying to add friction to reduce how often I check it. They have a feature—one I despise—that shows you how many notifications you have, even if you're logged out. So, out of habit, I'll type LinkedIn into my browser, and without thinking the login page pops up. Normally not a problem, I can just close it and move on. But LinkedIn shows you how many people are trying to reach out with a big red bubble. Of course, when you actually go through the trouble of logging in, you find that half of the notifications are ads, half are notifications for crap you don't care about, and the rest are probably bots trying to add you as friends. It's infuriating. They lie to you, take away your trust—ok, yes, you just found out why I wrote this article and why I'm so pissed.

But we don't have to give into the numbers game in everything. There's art we can make purely because it needs to exist, because our heart calls for it.

When I sit down to design software, some of it for consumer customers, and some of it for business users, I often have a goal I need to work against. There's some metric we need to move, and our hope is that the right design, given constraints and feedback, will move that metric. That's how product design works, and I'm fine with it. But, you can't quantify everything that a good product designer attempts to bring to their craft. The time I spend picking the right affordance, reducing the amount of clicks, working through information hierarchy—that can never be entirely quantified, but the people who matter—the folks who will use the software—can feel it.

So yes, understand the business metrics, learn how numbers matter and fit in. But keep your gut intact, understand that your intuition—your brain, your heart, your experience—are worth leaning into. When you pull up Claude and ask it something, and it attempts to ingratiate itself against you, just remember that it's a bag of words that mathematically predicts the most likely next word based on its corpus of data.

I've been all over the place with this one, but I want to remind you that you cannot be quantified, defined. You're more than that, and the creative work you do matters. We need that, and we need you. Go make something wonderful.