function the last few months there has
been a lot of frustration or I I kinda
wanna just call it negativity and the
community so one of these rants going
around where people
I don’t know at first they were just bit
negative and frustrated but it has
lately escalated to people actually just
calling out and lashing out and
name-calling people in the open-source
community because they’ve created these
tools that the article authors are not
happy with in different ways in today’s
video I want to talk about one thing and
one thing only and I want to talk about
the difference between a maker and a
consumer I want to begin by talking
about lake overturns sometimes at the
bottom of lakes there is a buildup of
carbon dioxide during many many years
and sometimes when there is a small
earthquake for example that shakes this
big pocket of carbon dioxide loose and
it bubbles up to the surface and these
pockets of carbon dioxide they are so
big that they will lower the oxygen
levels in the area around the lake so
low that the air is no longer breathable
so everything around the lake that needs
to you know breathe this dies from
asphyxiation lake overturns are
thankfully very rare but the last time
it happened it killed 1,700 people that
were you know just hanging around
minding their own business I find the
fact that lake overturns exist to be
oddly calming that is because it it
reminds me that the universe does not
owe me Sh
so whenever I run into you know some
dependency configuration problem or a
crap that I can’t figure out I try to
remind myself that yeah this is a bit of
a hassle but you know the universe could
also just decide to randomly kill me so
back to makers and creators makers they
go into this chaos and they make sense
of it
and they make creation that gives the
illusion of order
and consumers they consume these things
feature films it’s an extremely good
example of the chaos of the universe
being turned into an extremely
controlled experience for consumers so
you you order tickets online with your
friends and you are presented with this
nice – our experience in comfy chairs
somebody has to coordinate thousands of
people in order to make this extremely
complicated an expensive thing that is
the feature film three thousand and
three hundred and ten people worked on
the Iron Man 3 movie and I don’t know if
you have ever managed people but I find
like I find it to be really hard to make
five people do what I want another
example there might be more close to
home is there smart for my absolute
favorite quote from qua from xkcd is
that computers are essentially just
well-organized Sam there are probably
hundreds or possibly thousands of
components inside of this thing and
millions and millions of source lines of
code a smartphone does work remarkably
well considering that it is well
essentially sand and some metal but that
is because like thousands and thousands
of people spent insane amount of work
making making chaos into this thing that
looks like while it’s not
of course we don’t strictly build using
only sand we have tools available to us
so what are tools tools tools are things
that humans make that are somewhere in
between in a iPhone and sand sort of
like for example my CPU the camera that
I’m using it can be seen something like
something in between this episode and
photon see I just realized that I have
walked in a really stupid way here I
think I have to cross this tools are
something that a maker creates as a
byproduct of their making process they
run across a problem that I need to make
more efficient and sometimes I do share
that solution I open sourcing them
sometimes or sometimes selling them
there is a subtle but important
difference between a tool like react and
a consumer good like the iPhone or the
Iron Man 3 movie when you are making a
an iPhone or a movie like Iron Man 3 you
are focused on the audience on making
the audience happy hi phones and feature
films exist primarily to make consumers
happy whenever I use my iPhone or watch
or shine man 3 I fall into this consumer
mindset I paid for this thing and it’s
intended to make me happy and I’m
disappointed if it doesn’t but sometimes
when I work with developer tools I
I sometimes fall into these the consumer
mindsets there as well so right now I am
learning docker and Android and it’s
sometimes just annoys me greatly how
messy things are for instance there is
no clear way on how to store passwords
in dr. so everybody else has their own
solution for it and in Android there is
a wrapper around the build system that
wraps another build system which is also
a project management system and a
package map and it is especially easy
for me to get into this mentality when
they are when their companies involved
like docker and Google because it kind
of makes it feel like they are consumer
products you just feel like this is
why can this not be like an iPhone they
speak at these conferences and then
promote these things and their careers
benefit from it I am entitled to having
this work I’m gonna go home and write an
article on medium in moments when I feel
like that
and also in moments much like this road
I just not walk this road again Jesus
Christ into my heart
it’s a moment like that that I try to
remember that development tools are not
like iPhones they are not built to
please me in the way that a feature film
or iPhone is made I try to remember the
tools are made of side effects of
another maker solving a problem and it’s
up to me as a maker to wade through all
the available tooling and figure out
what tools match my problem
the consumer just wants the world to
work but maker that’s the person that
makes it work
of course we all switch all the time
between being the consumer and being the
maker in our daily life but I I see
people around me that seem to spend a
lot more time in the maker role than
other people those are people I aspire
to be like because I I genuinely
consider them to be better and more
valuable people to be honest so what I’m
saying is that don’t go around feeling
entitled to having things work for you
because that attitude is just gonna make
you unhappy
unproductive instead try to assume
responsibility and make things better
I’m going to finish this episode with
one of my favorite quotes from one of my
favorite books 7 Habits of Highly
be a light not a judge be a model not a
critic i’m mvj this is fun fun function until next Monday morning stay curious