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Blue skies, smiling at me
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 3:23 pm on 2/10/2005
Last night I was writing some user stories for Cornucopt… by which I mean I was writing a user story, and by “user story,” I mean, well, follow the link if you’re that interested (but know I’m not following their spec that closely). I was trying to describe some new features we want to build, in terms of stuff that normal folks would do with them. This was frustrating, not because I couldn’t think of an adequate one – I did, although it isn’t all written down as of now – but because I only had the one, and it was insufficiently… new.
I’ve always been obsessed with the new. I have an annoying tendency only to buy books and CDs – especially CDs – that have come out in the last 12 months. Let’s not even talk about movies; I still haven’t seen Citizen Kane. I used to be mystified by people who would dig into obscure old literature and not want to read the brand new novels I was excited about. How could they feel any urgency about it?
With software, I’m often the same. I want to see the strange new forms we can get with new tools, even if it isn’t immediately obvious what these forms will be good for. This urge to see the new shapes software can take, and the new shapes it can give human interactions when we take it online, eventually drove me to create this way-too-ambitious software project. I wanted, and want, Cornucopt to be the Movable Type for people who want to produce new, unrecognizable, maybe unpredictable structures for their content as easily as MT lets you create new visual styles for the page. And I think we’ll still get that.
But last night, as I sat there thinking, “Dammit, I need a story where this other use happens, where things interact in some way that’s really surprising to me and yet secure…” I realized that not only was I trying to outthink myself, but that I didn’t need to make Cornucopt useful for things I couldn’t think of. Other people who use it will think of things I wouldn’t, and it has enough loosely joined parts that their uses will surprise me (and no doubt horrify me at least once).
We’re simply past the point where much of anything I come up with for Corny’s design will really excite me. It’s on rails (so to speak) for the foreseeable future. We even have a commercial app which we are trying to emulate, at least in part. I’m just not gonna be generating much more in the way of blue-sky ideas, at least not until this code gets in a few more people’s hands. And that’s kind of sad. But it’s also a sign that I’ve made something real, that is approaching – dare I say it? – maturity. And that the next surprises will be surprising indeed.
Nicholson Baker has a chapter in his first lots-going-on-and-not-a-damn-thing-happenin’ magnum opus The Mezzanine, in which the lead character suddenly realizes that he is more or less who he is going to become. His mannerisms, ways of looking at the world, while not set in stone, were basically on the path they would always be on. He watches himself, fascinated, as his personality comes to a screeching halt, as I believe Baker puts it. And he’s excited about this; he describes it to his co-workers later on.