One of the ways to design a simple user interface that can really do things is to take the hardest tasks imaginable and try to create convincing scenarios of how they might be done at all. Then the simplest tasks must be considered in the light of the structures postulated for the most complex.

Creators need an immediate connection to what they're creating. If you make a change, you need to see the effect of that immediately.

the best and most interesting interfaces usually let you directly manipulate some kind of abstract / invisible concept.

No one could accuse Building 20 of burying its Services too deep in the Structure. Recabling from office to office, lab to lab, or even wing to wing is largely a matter of do-it-yourself. Rather than a burden, the occupants consider this a benefit. The wide wood stairs in Building 20 show wear in a way that adds to its myth. You feel yourself walking in historic footsteps in pursuit of technical solutions that might be elegant precisely because they are quick and dirty. And that describes the building: elegant because it is quick and dirty.

A good creative tool should let people make ugly but unexpected things, I think. Any new capability that yields only beautiful things is a subtle kind of tyranny.

hardware/software worldbuilding

Give someone state and they'll have a bug one day, but teach them how to represent state in two separate locations that have to be kept in sync and they'll have bugs for a lifetime

process will become part of the product

Function reforms form, perpetually.

Besides quotes it's been fun to just open up and try out random phrases/concepts in there. Feels like jotting something on scratch paper - lightweight, maybe the connections jog more thoughts, maybe not.

We build our computer systems the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.

Personal Mastery: If a system is to serve the creative spirit, it must be entirely comprehensible to a single individual.

We make, not just to have, but to know.

magic but no hidden parts

kinds of things where somebody does more than is absolutely necessary for the sake of the feeling they get when doing it.

I’ve been saying to anyone who’ll listen for years now that an abstraction motivated by avoiding duplication has a dramatically higher chance of being a bad one. A good abstraction is about making the solution more closely resemble the problem, I call this “abstraction fit”.