Building as a reflection of beliefs

I started building side projects as a high school sophomore. Back then, I was mostly learning. Learning how to build, how to stay motivated, how to get other people to care about what I had to say. And then I started building for utility, building tools that I wanted to exist so I could use them in my own life, to improve my day to day.

This year, I found myself and my public work at a strange place, where I'm building for the same reasons, but also as a way of acting on and representing my beliefs about a different kind of relationship humans can have with software and computers than what most of us live with. Indeed, this is a lot of what we discuss on a recent podcast I did with the Muse team. As much as I'm building things like a personal search engine for me to use, I'm also building these things and talking about them to let others know that they can build these things too, and that we can rethink the power dynamics and relationships we have with our software tools and ecosystems.

I'm not the only one doing this, of course -- other similar "building as a representation of belief" projects include Rasmus Andersson's Playbit and Hundred Rabbits. But nonetheless, I think it's an interesting place to be for a person who makes things: not only to make them for the sake of the end products, but as a form of speech about the very act of building.