Staying Hungry, Staying Foolish

Anytime someone says &quot;I think too much&quot; I feel the need to speak up. This mentality is, from my experience, destructive. When I was on a Mormon mission questioning the beliefs and bringing it up to my superiors, that was the response I was given far too often and I&#x27;ve come to resent it.<p>The sentence before says: &quot;I think I know too much&quot; and that bogs down his creativity and energy. I&#x27;m calling bullshit. Who knows too much? How can you know too much? Does gaining knowledge really prevent one from being creative or energetic?<p>I think he comes closer to a point when he says: &quot;it’s my attention to that knowledge which is destroying my inspiration.&quot; But I think its not the attention to the knowledge that is &quot;destroying&quot; his inspiration, but the way in which he uses that knowledge.<p>Why not give attention to the vast amount of knowledge gained writing web apps since IE4, and then use that knowledge to create novel ideas or better ways of doing things? Why not use the knowledge to create something better than JavaScript instead of complaining about it?<p>I think the point to take from this, at least for me, is to keep an open mind. He sort of said things contrary to that multiple times, but I want to believe thats what he was getting at.

I agree so much with this article.<p>I have the feeling (which may be wrong, of course) that all the cool stuff nowadays is just repackaging the same shit we&#x27;ve always done, but on a different platform--web, android, iOS, whatever<p>The truth is, there is probably some sense to that. It&#x27;s what the market demands. But us engineers have the moral responsibility to push things forward and create new cool stuff again. I wrote a piece on this topic a bit ago, if you&#x27;re interested &quot;You only do it when nobody else will do it&quot; [1]<p>We are opening crazy new technologies to developers: arduinos, 3D printers, drones. However many engineers are stuck repackaging websites into iOS containers, and we can&#x27;t blame them, because they probably need that job and that money.<p>But here in HN I have a sense that we still have that spark of creativity, meta discussion and critic of the current state of the tech world, with all our cynicism, vision, and endless flamewars.<p>I think we all collectively advance a bit every time there is a frontpage link to a person who started their own OS just for fun, discussion on 80&#x27;s papers or technology, whatever software written in Lisp, or floppy drives playing the imperial march.<p>Sorry, I&#x27;m deviating from the main topic. But I guess it&#x27;s all the same underlying idea. Tech can be boring, or it can be fun. And it&#x27;s entirely our decision to choose either (or both). And I&#x27;m happy every time I read an article like this one, every time a cubicle-java-developer friend of mine buys an Arduino, every time Fabrice Bellard does some crazy stuff with computers, every time some guy reprograms a SNES game to play pong by killing koopas and placing bytes into the cartridge memory.<p>Those of us who went into studying Computing, whichever variant, probably did it for the cool stuff. Nobody goes to college with the intention of spending the rest of their lives implementing CRMs while dressed on a suit. So I think that us, as a collective, have some ethical responsibility to stay hungry, and help our colleagues do so.<p>Thanks for the article, I really liked it a lot.<p>[1]: <a href="http://cfenollosa.com/blog/you-only-do-it-when-nobody-else-will-do-it.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cfenollosa.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;you-only-do-it-when-nobody-else-w...</a>

&gt; The problem is that when we start out as software developers we don’t know the “right way” to do things so we are less constrained in what we do. We just march forward and go do things. As we start to learn the “right way” to do things, we are often stifled by that knowledge and the constraints it brings and that causes us to be less productive or to over engineer and design solutions to problems.<p>I&#x27;ve felt that exact thing my entire career. I&#x27;m not a classically trained engineer - I&#x27;m a product guy who happens to be really good at building shit. Spending way too much time on sites like Hacker News over the years has taught me a bunch about how Internet loudmouths think things should be done. Learning these things has put me in the upper echelon of developers. I don&#x27;t think of myself as an engineer, but I&#x27;ve been courted by some of the biggest names in software, and they pay me enough to comfortably afford living in the most expensive city in the country.<p>Yet, in spite of all of that, I&#x27;m fairly confident was more creative when I didn&#x27;t realize that the obvious way wasn&#x27;t always the best way, and I&#x27;ve wondered more than once what I might be making if I wasn&#x27;t always keeping so-called best practices in mind.

I thought this was entertaining, don&#x27;t get me wrong, but when he says:<p><i>porting all that great shit backwards to JavaScript</i><p>...I understand what he means, but &#x27;cmon, that ship sailed a long time ago. JavaScript won on the web. It&#x27;s far from perfect, and something better will replace it, but JavaScript successfully met the demands of rapid development.

...His RSS button open a malware site...

I honestly thought I was about to read an article about research linking daily blood-sugar to willpower&#x2F;intelligence... (which, BTW, is a thing, so try not to make important decisions right before lunch.)

A great post. The excitement of the OP in the post is quite palpable and I could feel it. I am brimming with excitement right now.

The better we get at anything, the more limited we become. - Steve Bodansky

This is cargo cult thinking. You can be greedy and psychopathic all you want, you still won&#x27;t get rich and famous like your idol.

Wow, is this written by an underclassman? Have you ever heard anyone who accomplished anything that bushed us forward comment on how difficult it was to lean forward? I challenge everyone here to hurt themselves a little bit while trying something that didn&#x27;t make sense to you at first because it impressed you.