Written in a plane somewhere over the pacific…
I’m fascinated by the ancient dialogue between art and craft — siblings raised in the same house of human endeavor. Craft, like a master carpenter’s worn workbench, speaks in the measured tones of discipline, each tool placed exactly where generations of experience dictate. It is the mathematics of creation, the golden equations governing beauty. Art, by contrast, is the rebel child who rearranges that workbench under moonlight, seeking to translate ineffable human experience into form. While the craftsman asks how best to make something, the artist challenges what “best” even means.
This dance appears in every crease of our world. Watch a pediatric nurse navigate between medical protocols and care — placing an IV in tiny veins while sing-song-ing their voice to talk to a child. Observe a mediator in a heated community dispute — argument structured perfected for conflict resolution, yet annotated by subtle adjustments from reading the room’s emotional weather. Craft provides the vocabulary through which the art speaks its truth.
In my own field of machine learning research, there’s craft in the rigorous mathematics of model architectures and the patient ritual of hyperparameter tuning. But the field lurches forward in moments of artfulness, when researchers push against the comfortable constraints of conventional wisdom.
There are many of you readers who roll their eyes at this example— and they’re not completely wrong! I am guilty sometimes of romanticizing what is at its core a practical exchange of labor for money. But I find it equally absurd to deny the deep craftsmanship that lives in our professions, perfected over centuries of human ingenuity. Though less obvious than a potter’s wheel or a painter’s brush, in every breakthrough big and small — from UX to ML research to scalable systems design — there lives an unquestionable engineering artistry. The pursuit of this artistry isn’t any less worthy than a love for knitting or painting.
I believe that craft and art can be found in all aspects of human endeavor. Even in our most intimate relationships, we navigate this duality — the craft of clear communication interweaves in our best moments with the art of vulnerability, does it not?
I often feel a magnetic pull toward artistry — that intoxicating urge to challenge boundaries, to leave my fingerprints on what I build. There’s beauty in that urgency to translate what burns inside us into something tangible and true. But I’m learning, slowly and sometimes reluctantly, that great art requires a foundation built from thousands of small, patient moments. The love of art, I’m discovering, must be matched by a love of craft.
But loving the craft can be hard. It demands a surrender that feels antithetical to our creative impulses. It asks us to set aside our grand visions and submit to the humbling process of mastery. It requires us to embrace repetition and find meaning in the mundane. Craft doesn’t offer any immediate gratification — it asks us to accept its gradual unfurling.
Learning to love the craft begins with forgiveness — a gentle acceptance of our limitations. What we create today must live between our aspirations and our ability, and we must choose to make it anyway. It’s about finding quiet joy in the evidence of growth, in realizing that you’ve reached some new shore in the ocean of mastery through countless small strokes of practice. Most of all, loving the craft means believing that everything you make — even these meandering thoughts about art and craft on a simple website — is beautiful, worthy of attention and pride.
The dance between craft and art, I suspect, takes a lifetime to master. Even then, mastery might just mean becoming comfortable with the eternal tension between when to follow and when to deviate. And maybe that’s enough — to make something, anything, with care, to honor both the guidance of generations past and the wild heart that yearns to break the rules, and in celebrating both, make something beautifully human.