Oh, come on

There’s a common attribute that makes for good designers, good engineers, good employees, and good companies. For a long time, I couldn’t figure out what it was. Was it practice? Was it skill? Was it innate ability? Turns out, it’s none of those. It’s taste.

When I first started designing as a hobby, I hated everything I made. I knew it was terrible, and no matter how hard I tried, I could never make it good enough for myself. But I didn’t give up, and after a while something clicked. I started to sort of like my work. But I am still not satisfied; every day I reach higher, trying to grasp the level of awesomeness that I can feel but can’t recreate.

I didn’t realize this was happening until I saw a video of Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, explaining the phenomenon as it relates to writing and production. He points out how that gap between ability and taste drives creative people to achieve great things.

Seibel: Is there a key skill programmers must have?

Zawinski: Well, curiosity—taking things apart. Wanting to know what’s going on under the hood. I think that’s really the basis of it. Without that I don’t think you get very far. That’s your primary way of acquiring knowledge. Taking something apart and looking at it is how you learn to build your own. At least for me. I’ve read very few books about computers. My experience has been digging through source code or reference manuals. I’ve got a goal and, alright, to do this I need to know what this thing does and what this thing does. And I’ll just sort of random-walk through that until I find where I’m going.

When I’m just writing the first version of the program, I tend to put everything in one file. And then I start seeing structure in that file. Like there’s this block of things that are pretty similar. That’s a thousand lines now, so why don’t I move that into another file. And the API sort of builds up organically that way. The design process is definitely an ongoing thing; you never know what the design is until the program is done. So I prefer to get my feet wet as early as possible; get something on the screen so I can look at it sideways […]

Sometimes I start at the top and sometimes I start at the bottom. It depends. One way is, I know I’m going to need these building blocks and I’ll put those together first. Or another way of thinking about it is, you’ve sort of got an outline of it in your head and you dig down. I do it both ways.