I Don't Know My Philosophy Yet

For a long time I was a developer without a philosophy. I had skills. Hand me a set of requirements and I could turn them into code, quickly and correctly, and I thought that was enough. Why we were building the thing, and what it would become for whoever used it, was not my question to ask. That belonged to the person who wrote the requirements. Looking back, I was a developer who implemented the requirements exactly as written, and nothing more.

I felt the gap when I started making my own products. When you build alone, nobody hands you requirements. What to make, what to put in and what to leave out, when to call it done: all of it is mine to decide. Skill tells you how to build something. It does not tell you why it should be built that way. That was the first time I felt I needed a philosophy.

The first time I really understood what a philosophy is, it came from a YouTube podcast I like to watch. One of the hosts runs a kindergarten. They took it over from their parents, and the children there learn through play. There is no textbook and no syllabus. Once, a child got stuck, and the teacher asked a question instead of solving it for them. The host said the kindergarten holds to one idea: “Don’t tell children too much of what they can find out for themselves.” So education has a philosophy too. When you think about it, philosophy is everywhere. Everyone lives by something they believe is right. What set this person apart was that they had planted that belief inside themselves and applied it, as it was, to their work. The thinking and the work were not two separate things. I found that deeply admirable.

Still, I could not borrow their philosophy. Helping children grow was the meaning they had grown inside their own work. It was not my meaning. What I admired was less the content of their philosophy than the way they worked while holding one.

I looked at other people’s philosophies too. Make less, but make it better. Build the back of the cabinet properly, even though nobody will see it. Follow the grain of the wood. All of it is true. Yet for some reason none of it moved me. It felt like nice things being nice. There were plenty of ways to make things well, but I could not find in them what I was making things for. I wanted my philosophy to carry meaning.

I have put meaning into a product once. It was while building Tuned, a tennis product. I love tennis, so the product started with one clear idea. People keep doing something for a long time when they choose it themselves, when they feel they are getting better, and when they feel they are doing it with others. So the product chose to help people play tennis longer and more deeply, instead of holding them in front of a screen. I liked that idea because it was more than a method for making things well. It was a way of putting meaning into a product.

But that is Tuned’s philosophy. It is a philosophy about tennis, which I love. It is not the philosophy of who I am. About tennis, I could say what matters. About myself, I still cannot.

So, to be honest, I do not know what my philosophy is yet. I do not think it is missing, though. Not long ago I spent a long time looking back at my past self. When I took out, one by one, the things I truly loved, the things I was good at, the places I kept going back to, I saw strengths and weaknesses I had not known about, and a direction I wanted to go. In the same way, there may already be a philosophy inside me that I do not know about yet. While looking for it, I may meet a version of myself I do not know yet either. For me, philosophy is the journey of finding myself.

That is why I write about philosophy. What goes here are the thoughts I have while still looking. If I waited until I had found it all, I would probably never write a word. These essays are my thought experiments, my inner growth, and the soil for both me and my products.

Someday, like that host, I want to be someone whose beliefs show in their work exactly as they are. Until then, I am writing it down as still looking.