Impact.

This month for IndieWeb Carnival, Alexandra invited us to write about impact:

i'd love to see your blog posts, webpages, or other media about impact. i think reflecting on the impact we leave on the world, and what kind of legacy we will leave in our absence—dependent upon our actions, experiences, and perspectives—makes us think about what kind of people we want to be. to me, this kind of self-reflection can be a helpful examination to help us determine our future, process our past, and become more present and aware of our effect on others.

If you have a blog, why not join us? Instructions for how to participate are in Alexandra’s blog post linked above. If you’re interested, you can read all of my IndieWeb Carnival entries.

I’ve been thinking about impact a lot for over a decade. In my mid-twenties, I joined the startup world and out there were a lot of people who talked about impact. In my social groups, there are many great people whose path with startup world has crossed because they’ve seen it as a way to have an impact.

I have previously written about my reasons for doing what I do in my /why statement.

I grew up learning how to write code. I wrote my first websites and PHP scripts as a teenager, studied software development during high school and university. I became a professional software developer and have worked in various companies writing code.

I could spend 8 hours a day writing code and building software. That would have some sort of impact. Its quality and whether it’s a positive or negative would depend on what I build and where I work.

At some point I realised that it’s not exactly what I want to do. I kept thinking about the discussions about impact I had with people over the years. I discovered I can have a bigger positive impact doing something else.

If instead of spending that 8 hours writing code, I spend it teaching programming and building communities for people interested in development, I can multiply that impact manyfold. Way beyond the much discussed 10x.

Let’s say for an argument’s sake that I help 100 people get interested in the industry and learn software development. It takes a few years for them to become productive but they will quite quickly surpass what I could do. At that point, my impact has been roughly 99x compared to me doing the work.

But that’s not all. Those 100 people are likely to be something I’m not. They come from different backgrounds, they have different thoughts on the world, they get different ideas and they are creative in different ways. In addition to multiplying the “hours worked” by 99, the multiplication of diverse thoughts that drive the future of technology is so much more.

I also grow the potential impact by bringing in other people who know more or different things than I do to share their knowledge and inspire people through their shared experiences. I’m very much a beginner on web accessibility for example but I have many friends who know much more than I do and they are happy to help.

It’s not just about helping new people get into the industry either. Through communities, I can help people find each other: to be inspired, to learn more and to find new people to build things with. If I can help a group of people to discover they have similar interests and complementing skills, they can do new things together and make the world a better place.