People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. — Alan Kay

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

Author: Alan Kay

Insight: There's something bracing about this idea that still applies way beyond programming. When you're deeply invested in how something works, you hit limits imposed by tools that weren't designed with your specific vision in mind. Kay was saying that true mastery sometimes means building the foundation yourself—not because you hate delegation, but because you can't fully express what you're trying to do otherwise. The counterintuitive part is that this isn't really about being a perfectionist control freak. It's about understanding constraints so thoroughly that you realize they're not laws of nature, just someone else's compromises. A musician who understands instrument construction plays differently. A chef who grows some of their own ingredients cooks with different instincts. You stop accepting limitations as given and start seeing them as choices you could make differently. Today, when most of us are encouraged to specialize and outsource, Kay's point stings a little. We've gotten comfortable with abstraction—clicking buttons in software we don't understand, using platforms designed for someone else's priorities. Sometimes that's fine. But if you care deeply about what you're creating, spending time in the "hardware" level of whatever you do, understanding how the foundations actually work, changes what becomes possible.