Kevin Main

When I worked at Apple, I remember seeing code that was 15 years old. Every file had a comment at the top with the date and the author’s name. You’d open a file and read through it, sometimes touching a feature no one had touched in a decade. Everything felt very permanent, like a house made of bricks. Everyone who made a brick put their name on it before slotting it into the house. Even in a massive company, you were proud of your bricks. Each one fit so satisfyingly into the bricks around it. When someone was renovating a room you had worked on years ago, they’d reach out and say, “I found this brick with your name on it. Can you tell me what it was doing here?” Sometimes old bricks would get taken out during a renovation, but they were usually kept in a pile in the corner to reuse in the future. Now you can will whole houses and neighborhoods into existence. You don’t even see the bricks go in. They just tumble in from the sky. You walk into the new house and wave your hands to push walls back, throw up a chimney, or drop in a kitchen. It's so fucking cool. But you forget what a brick feels like. And it’s hard to know how sad to be about that. The houses are better, they go up faster, and building them increasingly feels like magic. Still, every once in a while you miss holding a brick.