Symbiosis in thought and design

The design and the content of this site are so expressly interwoven that, more often than not, I am developing them alongside one another. Code occupies one half of my screen, prose the other. Each part makes demands of its counterpart.

I don’t yet know if this makes for more or less durable design. Tentatively, I think it presents an opportunity for living structure, resilient interdependence, and harmony of vision. I hold it as an ideal that this site should come to reflect and extend my thinking process, so naturally the software must develop as more of my thinking comes into the folds of this site.

In either case, I find that I cannot imagine trying to fit my thoughts into the spaces provided by existing tools. Not because my thoughts are too large, the opposite in fact, they are too small. Existing tools are too large (as perhaps is the web), they’re stifling. Their primitives are too generic, built to accommodate everyone, they annihilate everything.

Building the tool (code) and using the tool (writing) in tandem like this creates a tight feedback loop that feels generative. When I stall in my thoughts I can step into the code and extend the scaffold where I have reached out over its edges. When programming gets the best of me I can shake out the roadblock and wireframe a solution in writing before mounting a solution in code. In this way I am able to keep all of this project close to me, remain connected to all its parts. All of its edges and limits are of my own making, and I can unmake them. I am not bound by anyone else’s design.

I wonder if this will be a perpetual process. I would expect that the pace of development will slow as the software grows to accommodate more of my necessarily finite needs, while I certainly hope the rate of writing will only increase, so they don’t seem to be in lock-step. Indeed they could be inversely related, perhaps as that time approaches and the code occupies less of the my thinking I will become a more prolific writer. But I do wonder if the realisation of doneness might also reveal that there is/was a real symbiotic alliance between the two classes of script, that their combined momentum yielded a stability that could falter as they diverge.

Well, we’ll cross burn that bridge when we get to it.