Worse Is Better • Matt Neary

One of the coolest aspects of software development is the way it makes really big theoretical questions around system design totally accessible. Every teenager building a web app is deploying an ad hoc bureaucracy of computer processes. As you get more experience, you start to think critically about how it all fits together.

I remember reading “The Rise of Worse is Better” a decade ago. The first time I read it, it felt like a call to action. It’s the story of how less elegant designs have come to dominate the world of computing, outcompeting and rendering irrelevant so many other, more brilliant systems. I felt compelled to investigate these alternate threads of history. I wondered what the world would look like if The Right Thing had won at each step along the way to our modern tech landscape.

Toward the end of high school I started taking math at The Ohio State University. This meant that, while still a high schooler, I now had access to the university libraries. I’d often come home with a stack of books on things like lambda calculus, Lisp, and the history of computing. When I started undergrad, now at Harvard not OSU, I took lots of classes in the Computer Science and Math departments, but also Government and History. Ultimately I got my degree in History & Science, and my interest in the history of technology grew from hobby to full-time focus (for a couple years).

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