My given name is Charles C Williams, Jr - which has baggage. I managed to set it down at some point.
I'm one of the lucky wizard/craftsman behind the illuminated rectangle of your screen(s). I write the code that makes the whole world sing, or at least that's how I feel about it. I care about making things that work for people, and definitely not the other way around. I think that people working for things contributes substantially to problems in our world. We need people to get back to working for people. Humans living in their work for our tribes - who/whatever they/that may be. I'm an optimist, and I emphatically believe that we can do this, just perhaps not within my (current) lifetime.
I know that many software developers have made horrible lives for many people. I know that a/n crappy/awesome interface can make a person's life hell/heaven. Horrible interfaces make/encourage people to work/live for the thing (system, machine, managers, buildings, toilets, showers, etc.), or against the thing (with cheats and workarounds in a crappy system). However brief (repetitive) that work may be, these poor beings slowly over the course of time become a slave. Their precious time in this reality becoming service the to the thing - if even for a moment. Working for things is not freedom. It is slavery.
Of course - if that work is rewarding, many difficult obstacles are overcome. The wellspring of true joy for me is finding this path to enjoying our work.
My lifes work has been to limit that as much as possible, and give to the world time. More time to live, more time to care, more time. I do this by finding the wasted motions in their interfaces, and eliminating them, or coaching them, or guiding them through to a successful interaction.
It may not be big and important to you, but it is to me. This practice involves understanding human psychology, communicating complex ideas simply, and it doesn't hurt to understand a bit about kinetics and memetics, (how the body moves and ideas transfer). I look at the patterns of interaction in metaphorical terms. Sometimes they are machines. Sometimes they are plants. Sometimes they are vehicles, universes, atoms, and stages.
When I contributed to the codebase as a consultant with American Greetings on the first version of their Photo-book application - honestly I didn't feel like they were happy with what we delivered. But when they patented our work, and listed me along with the rest of the main contributors, I was very pleased and proud. And then when I heard they sold it to some online company called "Shutterfly" I was intrigued, and glad they had gotten "new legs" out of it. And then when I started meeting women who had ordered that photobook (after a 12 year very isolating marriage), I got "new legs" out of it.
When FedEx bought out Kinkos, and wanted to deliver an online system delivering finished works, I spent weeks away from my family and made those goddam page-turning previews work. I struggled to make sure that the preview was as accurate as it could possibly be, calculating real-world picas to pixels.
The key is identifying the intent of the system. Understand what it wants - as though it were conscious. See it from it's perspective. Consider giving it a pronoun. "He" or "She" or "Ki". Know that you give of yourself a portion of your mind to another mind. Know that is was sourced from within, and it will live beyond you - continuing her contribution long past your death.
I haven't talked about many other parts of me (as per introduction), but I'll just keep it mostly professional and ideological for now. I'm sure if I continue it will get personal and political soon enough. For now, I thank whatever consciousness decided to make this reality what it is, and make humble requests of it to be kind to me, understanding deeply that _______ has been, will be, and never wasn't.