--Originally published at richardctc201
Today in the morning I watched the interview to Ward Cunningham in the 239 episode of Triangulation. Ward Cunningham is kind of a hero (and for ‘kind of’ I mean the one and only hero) of the web/programming community. He is the creator of the wikis; he was one of the main developers of the Eclipse ISE, and have always been one of the leaders of web development.
The first comment that caught my attention was in minute 3:00, when Ward said “I found at the time, that engineers were awfully conservative. They didn’t wanna use things that haven’t seen or worked before.” Ward declared that this situation lead him to asked people for new ideas; he asked engineers about things that could be improved, and all of this ideas helped him to establish most of his innovative ideas he had in his career.
Later in the video, when Leo and Ward are talking about the Wikis. Leo said something very interesting about Ward’s invention. Leo exposed that Ward’s creation was so revolutionary that it changed something that no one else had done: erase the imaginary line between the creators of the webpages and the readers, so that everybody in this world can work as a team, that for Leo, it is the most intangible value of this life.
Finally I think that the most important think for the purpose of the class is when Leo reflect about the importance of the fact that Ward had no pressure for doing tasks, he did everything because he felt like doing it; he did it for pleasure; he did it because he like to. In this semester, Ken wanted us to experience something similar to the student life of Ward. Ken’s politic of abolishing grades helped us to establish our own priorities; we centered on things we liked; we were free to do what we thought was going to be more helpful for our knowledge, and all the other things were put apart.