Engineers and Curators
29 Jan 2026
I’ve always had a penchant for things that look nice and read well. As a kid in the summers, I would read at least 10 books between the biweekly trips to the library. Nowadays, I find that my Spotify playlists have reached thousands of songs, my notes are filled with shows and movies that are filling my backlog, and even my wish list on Steam contains around 600 or so games. Indeed, I’ve come close to becoming a digital hoarder. Traipsing across my room as a kid, I would be imagining how I would write the next page in a book I had just put down and couldn’t wait to pick up again. For my whole life, I fill my mind palace like a dragon’s hoard of pictures and words with the rantings and ravings of what comes next clawing at the back of my mind. I often joke with my friends that I am a modern patron of the arts - at this point, what else am I buying? As of late, I find that people are less excitable about the things that others make. Rather, there is a constancy in their desire to create - making loud noises and dazzling colors to ensnare the minds of the invisible room that composes the audience is all that dominates the mind. Yet, I feel we are forgetting the wonder that is felt when captivating by the darling of another mind. It’s all too dramatic a tragedy to misremember the interminable heartache of the shut door - halting you from another world and leaving you in the wild hunt across the corridors of your imagination for that slip in the crack to let yourself in.
I imagine that it is this very confrontation that drives a person to create something that once again inspires that very same zeal in others. The very passions that slice the mundane can sow the seeds of passion that create projects bigger than you imagined. On the contrary however, it is often said that ideas are cheap and execution is priceless. The subtlety that I would add is that the execution is a search of all those ideas and iterations before you - a close inspection of the hearts and projects that people once clutched closely to themselves. The pursuit of engineering is as close to curation as it is invention. Just a little bit of purple prose can turn what one would call “research” into something closer to reminiscing. The nostalgia is inherent when we learn from our teachers, talk amongst ourselves, and reflect about once was. We remember fondly and paint pretty picture of those heated discussions for ears that no longer listen and live, and the stresses felt by the hearts of none other than the first to do, the first to make.
Throughout this Software Engineering course as I have throughout my Computer Engineering degree, I hope to take seriously of times gone by. Wherever the winds take my career, I hope to take the position of curator first - a proper appreciator and preserver of all that came before. To become a better designer of all that comes next, it is necessary to learn from the mistakes of history, and develop that keen sense of heritage of the engineers that built the world we live in. In turn, I hope my career helps solve problems in a way that captures the attention of others in the same way I was once enraptured. But until then, I find that it is time to watch and learn - to make what I can for myself and one day others.