Great Geeks Are Great Humans

You can’t be a great geek w/o being a great human.

I get how the tradition says you can.

I get how much you wish it were so.

You can’t be a great geek w/o being a great human.
Being a great human is fabulously hard. It’s the hardest thing humans have ever conceived of.

So, raise your game. I need to raise my game. We need to raise our game. You beat the first boss handily. You found the second boss hard. Take on the third boss. To the extent we background or suppress the human-ness of those that make code, to that exact extent, we make a desolation.

And, yes, that’s an argument about love & kindness & hippie shit.

But guess what: it’s an argument about profitability, too.

You can’t buy my shtick seriously w/o knowing how human I am. That’s true of all of the founders of our movement, and it’s true of all of the persons we value from our larger tradition.

I’m not telling you not to geek out on my technical content. I’m telling you that content is based firmly in me being a human, that is, decidedly imperfect, decidedly emotional, decidedly inappropriste.

Take the technique, consider where it comes from.

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