Whose work inspires or motivates you?

Richard Stallman is someone I admire for his many contribution and ideas on user freedom in general and of course for its core contribution to Emacs.

I’m continuously inspired by Marc Edwards’ bjango website and his apps. He’s a thoroughly remarkable designer and a treasured member of the community, given his extensive contributions publicly accessible on his Articles page. I’ve also lately grown quite fond of Gavin Nelson’s stupendous icon work, they’re humbling to say the least, haha.

I take inspiration from many different indie developers and creators I follow on Twitter. I think it is fascinating that we live in a time where we can create things that we wish existed and easily distribute them on the internet from the computers in our homes. So every time I open my Twitter feed, I see what others are working on, and this inspires me to continue creating.

I think what motivates me the most is seeing the cool stuff other developers do. There’s so many apps out there where I try and think “Dang, I wish I’d done that”.

As mentioned, Montaigne’s Essays and other pragmatic philosophers inspire my writing, as does Ruben Schade from Rubenerd.com, as does Jeremy Parish when it comes to retro game writing. I still have a lot of ideas on combining bread baking concepts with philosophical approaches stuffed away in my notes somewhere. I admire normal people that don’t work too hard and love writing about anything, not just boring technical stuff about compilers.

The biggest inspirations for my site were probably — in no particular order — the sites of conlangers Jan van Steenbergen and David J. Petersen, Kicks Condor’s linkroll Href.cool, the blog Diamond Geezer, the Institute for Y2K Æsthetics, and, i suppose, that one Youtube series where the guy tries to walk across Wales in a straight line.

This was a bit difficult to answer; there are a lot of bloggers whose site designs I like and enjoy, probably way too many to mention here. I will give a special shout out to old-timey bloggers like Cory Doctorow, Seth Godin, or Rands who have been blogging since forever (and I’ve been reading them forever too!) but unlike me are way more prolific and manage to cover much more interesting topics.

There’s five people that come to mind from the iOS indie community who I’ve been fortunate to bounce ideas off for a couple years now (in alpha order);

• Aaron Pearce: https://twitter.com/aaron_pearce
• Emmanuel Crouvisier: https://twitter.com/emcro
• James Haville: https://twitter.com/jameshaville
• Jordi Bruin: https://twitter.com/jordibruin
• Mustafa Yusuf: https://twitter.com/mufasaYC

They’re all doing amazing work in the indie space and inspire + motivate me to continue persisting with my journey.

In my professional life, I’m always coming across apps that I admire, usually for their aesthetics and design. And there a number of indie developers out there that are incredibly helpful, either personally or with the advice they share publicly, and I wish I did as much as they do.

As for motivation, though, I guess I’m just lucky in that I enjoy what I do: getting to sit at home all day, making my own hours, coding an app I love and which is used by others to create novels and screenplays and other stuff - what more motivation do I need?

Many of the hackers of the 70s-90s are a big inspiration and personal heroes of mine (think people like Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Rob Pike, Jamie Zawinski, Paul Graham, etc). Same with the community leaders in every programming community I’m active in. (e.g. here are some of my Clojure heroes - https://metaredux.com/posts/2019/06/10/clojure-heroes.html)

As for my motivation, it comes from two directions:

• my never-ending desire to learn new things and to tinker with new things
• the feeling I experience when I’ve done something useful for others - that’s probably the biggest appeal of working on OSS projects for me. I think that most people feel great when they see that their work matters to others.

I’ve been inspired by the works of designers like Imran Chaudhri, who worked on ‘slide to unlock’ for the first iPhone, and hundreds of other interfaces on the iPhone and Mac. It’s astonishing to me how Imran built the interfaces for technologies that were still emerging at the time.

In terms of hardware design, I admire Jony Ive’s work a lot. There’s a lot of thought and care that goes into his designs.

Hm, you know, it’s a good question. I self-motivate, I think, mostly. I know it’s common for people to look upon the works of others for inspiration, and I think that is probably true of me as well. But it’s more of an ethereal thing for me: it’s a range of things – concepts, ideas – that drive me, and less so any particular person. So when I sit down and half-invent something, it’s because of that.

Okay, grab bag! The single most creatively inspiring thing I read this year was Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds. Several of the sentences in that book wired new pathways in my brain. I look forward every week to Nilay Patel’s podcast Decoder. Every episode is thought-provoking and substantial, whether he’s talking to the CEO of Intel or an Excel TikTok Influencer.

In the iOS developer world, I think Russ Shanahan of Happy Scale, who you spoke to recently, has really built something incredible. He brings such compassion and dignity to his business, and is just an all-around super generous person. He spent an hour on the phone with me when I was thinking about making a go of Albums full-time, which really meant a lot.

This could be a very long list :)

But in general, I admire all the forgotten people who push humanity forward. All the physicists, chemists, engineers, doctors, and so on, who work hard on extending the knowledge of humankind. These really are the forgotten heroes of our time without whom we’d be lost and wouldn’t live in the luxury we enjoy today (as opposed to 100 years ago). Just empty your pockets and look at everything that was in them - ranging from credit cards, car keys (which nowadays are almost a small computer), phone (which is really a computer that’s way more powerful than whatever you’ve used 20 years ago), but even something as ordinary bank notes - just think of all the ingenuity that goes into all the counterfeit measures that are within a single bill - all the dyes, layers, … No one seems to really think about these things, but it just shows how complex the world has gotten without anyone realizing it as everything is nicely packaged.

So my motivation comes from within my fascination by common objects that are not that common when one realizes how much effort and ingenuity was put into them. And I try to mimic this with my apps - I try to make something seemingly simple, but try to put a lot of effort under the hood, trying to push the app to the next level.

I’m very interested in the technical aspects of what I do, so most of my idols are people that discuss numbers and details that go over most people’s heads. Some of them are Illya Friedman from Hot Rod Cameras and Roger Cicala who writes for the Lensrentals blog. Jay Holben is also on this list with the recently published bible “Cine Lens Manual” in partnership with Chris Probst ASC. The way these folks manage to translate very complex ideas and information in easy (or almost easy) to understand words is something that greatly inspires me on my own journey to make information more accessible.

Everyone on my blogroll. I see their words each morning over coffee, and they’re a never-ending source of inspiration and joy. I’d call out each and every one of them by name, but then this Q&A would be even longer than it already is.

People think that blogging and writing are solitary activities. While I take great comfort in writing alone, you’re putting your thoughts out into the world for everyone to see, some of whom send feedback, or quote you in their writing. It’s a community, of which I’m honoured to be part.

There are some researchers that I think have done incredible work that has guided a lot of my thinking. Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody is one example. Anything written by danah boyd, but especially her book *It’s Complicated.* Megan Sapnar Ankerson has a book Dot-Com Design that has the sharpest takes on the evolution of web design I’ve ever read. So a lot of what I draw on comes from work being done in new media and semiotics.

In terms of who I follow to get insight into the web of today, I would put Molly White’s work, Jeremy Keith’s excellent link blog, and Ryan Broderick’s always on-point newsletter Garbage Day as my top resources.

I also have to give a shoutout to Dan Lewis, a former boss of mine and the creator of the blog Now I Know. Everything I learned at the beginning about newsletters I learned from him. Thanks Dan!

Bret Victor is someone whose work routinely hits a different level for me. He’s an incredible thinker and practitioner, which is a rare combination to have. His talk “Stop Drawing Dead Fish” is one of my favorites.

The people I admire and am inspired by are the ones we would consider unsung heroes. They are unknown to the wider public. Zakaria the conscientious hairdresser, Maria the tireless bartender, Beran the eager community-builder, Andreas the cheerful neighbour… These are people who show resilience in the face of hardship; who will give you half a loaf of bread even though one is all they have.

What they know is what I have learnt as well: we do not truly own anything; what we get is not ours to keep. I want to offer everything I do in freedom as I am taught from those fellows what it means to be humble. My hope is that my contributions can help someone out there and inspire them to be a force for good in this world.

I can’t help but admire Elon Musk, who took the idea of pushing the envelope to inconceivable levels – and earned himself billions in the process.

I also can’t help but admire Fred Hollows, who devoted his skills to restoring eyesight to the poor – for little to no personal enrichment.

As an educator, one of my principal inspirations is Amy Herman, who lead brilliant and creative education programmes at various museums in the US and is the author of a great book, “Visual Intelligence”. I am generally inspired by thinkers at the threshold of different disciplines - I find that most of the more interesting ideas emerge in the borderlands. In no particular order, I find envy-tinged motivation in work by Lawrence Weschler, Janet Malcolm, John Berger, Jenny Odell, Teju Cole, Amy Sillman, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Rodney Graham, Hanif Abdurraqib, Geoff Dyer, Michael Taussig and Anne Truitt. These are producers of ideas that germinate further unexpected ones. That is motivating.

I can’t sing or play music. But when you hear a really intricate piece of music, especially a live performance, and witness an artist who has mastered their craft - it’s awe-inspiring. And, for me, the high of coming away from seeing someone else so good at what they do can help me recommit to being better at my work. It’s the very definition of inspiring.

As for specific people, I’m currently obsessed with listening to Billy Strings play guitar. Pamela Adlon’s TV show “Better Things” is hysterically funny and grounded in a way that hits me in all the right places as a parent. I frequently turn to John Prine’s lyrics and Kurt Vonnegut’s books when I need advice. And I hope to make a Mac app as good as Flexibit’s Fantastical one day.

Apple is the obvious answer. But I’m honestly most inspired by the work of longtime Mac developers like Panic, The Omni Group, and Bare Bones Software.

I think the two programmers that most inspired me are John Norstad and Rich Siegel. John almost single handedly wiped out viruses on the Mac for the entire 90s, and his program’s elegance in performing tasks modelessly was something I always liked and try to emulate. He also had a focus on keeping complexity down, minimising preferences and other things that add cognitive load to the user and maintenance load to the developer. I’m not sure how well I’ve managed to emulate that. And Rich Siegel, author of BBEdit, has been an idol of mine since he was putting out updates of THINK Pascal, and I continue to use BBEdit pretty much every day.