Who are we Now?

This is based on my keynote at RubyConf 2026. They’ll publish a video eventually, I hope. There’s a philosopher in Naples, Italy, way back in the 1700s who understood something important to software today. Giambattista Vico lived early in the Enlightenment, when mathematical and experimental thinking were all the rage. René Des Cartes and Francis Bacon were the hotness. People were all about, what can we know for certain through logic alone? Vico said, wait. All that math is great, but it is not the only way of knowing. Yo, the only things we can fully understand are the things we made! things we know inside and out because we put them together. He expressed this: verum esse ipsum factum. “The true is the same as the made.” Today we call it Verum Factum. With this mindset, Viceo laid the basis for anthropology, ethnography, sociology, comparative law, historiography… a whole slew of fields. And he nailed my favorite feeling in software development. Verum Factum: we can only really…