We start with coding, and we get polymath
Exploring the Intersection of Web Development, Art, and Science
- If you are receiving this issue from the subscription of Spots of a developer, it's because I changed the name and the format. Feel free to unsubscribe if you wish, but I'll be happy if you hang around and join my effort to get new and wide perspectives -
There is a special approach to life that is called polymathic. In short words, it means the holistic process of integrating multiple disciplines, or specializations, with the aim of creating something unique, towards oneness. I was fascinated by this concept, getting a holistic view of many branches of human knowledge to mix them to create something new.
Most of my knowledge about this topic is coming from the book Why Polymaths?: How Multi-Specialists Revolutionize the Way We Learn, Work, and Live by Aksinya Samoylova, which I highly recommend.
Because many of us can stop pretending that we are just developers, teachers, scientists, or engineers. Many have not just hobbies, but fields in which we are interested and we have deep knowledge. Even a hobby can give us that (and what is the difference anyway?). And we can mix all this knowledge.
For example, I work as a developer, but if you have read my story, I've done a lot of different kinds of jobs before. This gave me some solid knowledge about other fields apart from coding.
Sometimes this knowledge is explicit (I can talk about it), and sometimes it's implicit (I apply it to my daily life without being conscious of it).
Not only that: I studied journalism and deeply studied (and wrote) poetry, and astronomy (I did many years of telescopic observations as an astrophile/amateur astronomer). Of course, without practicing I lost much theoretical knowledge from my memory; but when I write something, I see there are sparks of that knowledge here and there. Part of it is embedded in my unconscious.
So, here's how I want to define my approach now. With multiple fields, sometimes separated but being mixed.
A lifetime ago I didn't know about diversity in talent how is it so precious yet politicians discuss in Europe that we are all equal and all the same so we become all stamps but it is not so we all have different needs like software can be written in diverse ways. Each part of Nature has its own feature: what has sand, what has trees, what has mountains. Each person has either trees, or mountains, or both. But if we don't look for the trees, we won't see them.
Another subject that is very interesting to me is history. While web/software development itself, like coding, doesn't have much in common in itself, there are a couple of aspects that feel important. One is more obvious: the history of software or computers.
Another one, however, is more subtle. History is about how people related to each other, and created commerce (or wars). It's about how culture progressed, how we lost some aspects of the culture, or how we don't know (much) about other cultures.
We, as people, are defined not only by our education, character, etc., but also by our society, which is the result of our past, our history, and its contamination across different cultures. And sometimes we struggle to make our present and future better.
That's one of the purposes of coding: creating to make something better. Sometimes it's a client project and sometimes is our project.
It's also crafting something with our skills, and how we propagate our craft to the public or clients through communication and various aspects of society.
For this purpose, I've started a polymathic project: Holistic History (I don't know if I'll keep the name or change it, tell me if you like it).
The project will be about a holistic view of historical events, and how they relate to each other. It's massive, but it will be my playground and hopefully, I can ship something within the year!
I'll be using some tech to experiment with, starting with Remix, with Prisma as ORM, and SQLlite as DB. I will share the progress here and on my Substack notes / Instagram / Twitter. Here's the first scratch of DB.
If we wish to move from the past to the present and future, I follow astronomy and space exploration. Apart from the software that runs all the machines used for those purposes, and apart from the pure business-related economy around it, there is the curiosity and wish to improve humanity and its understanding of the world, and the universe.
I think that for this week the main topic that makes all this said above to fit together is the launch of Starship, the new rocket by SpaceX (and Elon Musk). As much as he's loved/hated, especially on Twitter, or because of Twitter, he's making an advancement (which could be good or bad) for space exploration (and possibly lunar colonization). For the same sake of curiosity and pushing forward, from Babilonia -making new laws, forming the first empires, making a better society- with Artemis and now Spaceship we're getting closer to the next -external- frontier.
The procedures, and engines, that SpaceX has produced derive from the past decades. It's not only technological advancement but also somehow a cultural shift. The space enterprise went from 100% government-based to more and more private funding and companies (sometimes unsuccessful like Virgin Orbit).
That, apart from the profit, means as well making it all a little more accessible (not yet to normal folks, of course, but still more than before). And more public interest means that people should see Earth, and humanity, more on a global level and less on a state/national level.
I think it's important to sustain this paradigm. Although private companies are profiting from all this, more and more connection and connectivity among human beings and seeing the collective, worldwide issues and no nations from orbit, should push humanity to consider itself above the limited borders.
One last, very important part. It is really difficult for the mind to go beyond its artificial structures, like borders and so on, although it sees how artificial they are. That's because the mind, and especially our conditionings, are difficult to break or surpass. One has to go into the present moment, into the silence, to see how everything connects. The past, the present, and the future. Only meditation, being thoughtless, will help us go beyond all these. I'll write more about that in the following issues.
With that, I hope you managed to read until the end and that you enjoyed it, and see you to the next one!