We need more crafters

I think the technology industry needs more crafters. People that have a genuine and lasting love for what they do.

Our industry is filling with people that are constantly trying to catch the latest trend, or create the newest product/project so that people have something to talk about. In most cases, they don’t have a genuine interest in the domain, they are just feeding their narcisistic needs. There’s a positive thing on that — we are constantly exploring new territories that otherwise would remain unexplored. However, there are important drawbacks:

• Since we don’t have interest in the problems’ domain, we never engage with our craft because we are constantly thinking about what’s next.
• It creates anxiety — The anxiety of figuring out how to stay relevant and catching up with everything.
• It distances us from the recepients of our craft, who just become a mean to feed our egos.

It’s easy to follow that path. I’ve done that myself, and I don’t like it. I prefer to keep my feet on the ground, and nurture the love for my craft. Outside the context of of Shopify, my craft is Tuist.

There are a handful of people in the community that I admire for their lasting and deep love for the craft that they do. Off the top of my head, I really admire’s Brent Simmons’s ingrained passion for RSS readers and NetNewsWire, and DHH (and Basecamp) and their passion for building Rails and helping teams collaborate. There are probably more, but those are the ones that popped in my mind. They have seen lots of shiny RSS readers being created, and many better-than-Rails frameworks, but there they are. After many years in the industry, they continue doing what they like the most.