I am X

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian polymath interested in invention, drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, paleontology, and cartography. Like him, many other geniuses of the Renaissance had interest in so many areas of knowledge. None of them put a label on themselves constraining their area of expertise. If they just found geology interesting, they grabbed a bunch of books to read and learn about it.

Fast forward to today, and talking about our industry, things have changed a lot. Developers of a given programming language, let’s say Swift, are just Swift developers. Commonly, when things arise in other domains they refuse to step outside their comfort zone. I think we developers have found our comfort zone in which we feel experts and for which we get paid a lot compared to other industries. I believe that’s one of the reasons why companies move slow. They have unnecessary friction coming from having too many technoly-X developers and very few Leonardo da Vincis. Those are developers that opt for opening tickets when they find issues in the tools that they use. Developers that do the same when there’s some work that involves backend development. Those tickets can live in the backlog days and weeks until someone picks them up.

When it comes to cross-discipline work, things are even worse. Don’t ask a developer to do a bit of design, or the other way around, ask a designer to do a bit of coding. It’s true that those are completely opposite disciplines, but imagine how powerful it’d be if we trained our brain to know a bit of both. If we could express our ideas by combining bits of design and code. One of the people in our industry that I admired a lot because he’s able to combine all disciplines to build great products is Tom Preston. GitHub & Chatterbug founder, he does design, development, and product brilliantly. In collaboration with other folks, he created the platform in which most of us spend hours and hours. The platform that stood out for its simplicity and social ideas that were copied by other competitors later on. Imagine if in its early days, he’d have had to look around to find designers and product experts to materialize their ideas around how social software development should be. I bet GitHub wouldn’t be what it is today.

How does all of that relate to me? Since I joined Shopify, I pushed my boundaries to do more work with other programming languages and domains. These days you can find me doing Ruby, using Ruby on Rails to build web apps, Javascript to do a bit of automation, or even Ansible to do a bit of devops. I might not be an expert in all of those, but when a task that involves cross-domain work arises, I’m able to deliver it entirely. With Tuist, I’m going even further. I’m reading a lot about design and product to come up with an identity for the tool. I’ve re-designed the website a few times, changed the logo a few others, and worked on defining the culture of the organization to ensure it’s healthy and collaborative. It’s sometimes exhausting, but worth it because the resulting product becomes a accurate reflection of the vision.

I believe our industry needs more crafters with Leaonardo da Vinci’s mindset. We need people that love the craft and whose main goal is not just making money. We need people that finds absorving knowledge exciting and that don’t set boundaries to themselves. The world would have better and more human tools. Designers would go beyond placing pixels or defining colors to understand the moral implications of their designs. Developers would show more empathy for others and build for everyone instead of for the latest device in the market.

I think we can all start by turning “I am X” (where X can be replaced with Swift developer, frontend designer, product manager, CEO) into “I can make X real”. What we need to get there is up to us to figure out.