The founder box

Thinking inside boxes For the entirety of my life up until a year ago, I put myself in a box. A metaphorical box, categorized by my skills, interests and epistemic scope. This was entirely self-imposed, but I suppose clinging onto identity is only human. Let’s call this the “programmer box”. The term is somewhat lossy but it serves the purpose here. The content I consumed, the people I interacted with, the culture that I found myself steeped in. The programmer box is tight. It’s well-bounded and there are clear membership criterea. You write code, you’re good at it, and there are legible, well-defined steps to get better at it. Understanding, nay, grokking computer systems and building an intuition for it is a tractable process. Strongbox and Jewel Casket, Rijksmuseum When we began Tangled, I firmly held my position within the programmer box. For many months we just wrote code and architected parts of the larger system. And then the more … unbounded stuff began to creep in. I was now…