“Brilliancy, Speed, Lightness, Glory”

A mantra taken from Bruce Sterling’s The Caryatids, a dystopic novel about recovering from the climate crisis. To me, this represents everything I strive for as a developer.

Brilliancy

Wit, lateral thinking, and epiphanies. The ability to solve an intractable problem with an ingenious solution

Speed

Not just working quickly, but being able to break work down into iterable tasks. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast

Lightness

Iteration, modular architecture, and legible code. If you can work on a project and hand it to another developer without them wanting to stab you, you’re doing it right

Glory

The transcendent quality that separates the good from the amazing, the little touches that change the way we think about UIs, and the reason we describe some products as “magical and revolutionary”