The Journey Begins

Some of you may already have heard about my crazy ideas, some of you have not, but when I dream, I dream big. Though I hesitate to say it outright, I genuinely want to change the whole face of technology - mainly just the face, mind you, the part we interact with regularly. How it looks. How it works. I’ve titled the sum total of my ideas Links, and am slowly over the years building towards that grand goal. Over time, I guess I’ve learned to see it in a more balanced way, though - that, how far I get doesn’t matter as much to me as does enjoying it along the way. While I won’t go into details about what my ideas are in this post, I do want to take you back with me to how it began, where those ideas came from.

Actually, the journey began long ago. How long, I’m honestly not quite sure. It wasn’t in grad school, continuing a prototype coding project I began as a senior in college. It wasn’t in college, working on an idea I loved in my spare time. It may not have even begun on that one enlightening, inspired, visionary night, lying awake in an apartment in Belgium, when out of the blue my thoughts went from my volunteer religious ministry to visualizing an interactive file browser, where you could explore the tree of your files, drawn before you in an incredible link-node diagram that just intuitively made sense. I could see it in my mind’s eye, a concept as clear as day, even if the details were a little muddy. You could say I got another mission call, that night, the slightest inkling of what my next mission might be, when finished with the one I was then serving.

That night in bed, my thoughts and heart racing with possibilities, I first began planning what would eventually develop into the Filing Tree. Though I would first need to figure out how to design the data structure to make it work, that’s a story for another day.

That night, I lay awake for hours - the first of many times - then scribbled down some quick notes and diagrams, and determined to set this idea aside and finish the last couple months of my two-year religious missionary service before allowing myself to be distracted by future project ideas. Like a reservoir building up behind a dam after a snow-melt, it was waiting for me when I finished. Like a lost puppy, slowly turning over the years into a faithful companion, it followed me through college, working itself into my thoughts, then my coursework, then my future career and life plans.

I worried, through much of that time, about pursuing so uncertain an idea. How could I do something so… large scale? Drastic? long-term? unprecedented? crazy?… and possibly hope to have a regular income, and support a family? I sought to learn ahead of time about the difficulties surrounding self-employment, the complications of academic research, and the nigh-impossibility, or at least threat-ful instability, of finding funding for private research. Could I even reasonably pursue this as a career, and make it work? Could I actually do what I thought I wanted to do? And, also of great importance to me: was this what God wanted me to do with my life? Indeed it seemed as though the ideas were given to me by Him, inspired, important somehow. Should I decide so early upon a career course, and so uncertain a one?

On one evening of pondering upon this conundrum, and taking a walk and talking with a dear friend, that friend left me with a thought that finally began to put me at peace. To paraphrase, she said to me, “Nathan, you will be a better father to your kids, and a better husband, if you come home from work, energized after a day of doing what you love, than if you come home exhausted and worn out, from just doing a job.” This, for some reason, clicked. It touched my spirit. And I felt that, however difficult the circumstances, pursuing this career would be worth that. That, I wanted it. And that, somehow, I could find a way. The question then became, how could I make this work?

The ideas irregularly flowing to me, it became clearer and clearer, must be coming from a source far greater than myself, with some purpose in them beyond my limited understanding. It seemed clear that I had been given, and was continuing to be given, a gift, an endowment of inspiration to accomplish a task. And, if that was so, how could I doubt? How could things but work out, somehow? Though it took time, and much prayer and pondering, I felt these answers, and more, come and slowly sink into my heart, and I began to trust that this path might just be doable.

You see, if it truly is important, God will provide a way. And if not, I will have done good work, learned a lot along the way, and can always make use of what I’ve learned in other jobs as needed, to provide for my family. And that thought definitely brought me more peace.

As I trusted, more and more deeply, so, more and more, the thoughts began to flow. As the dam began to break loose, a veritable flood of inspiration resulted, and a vision of possibilities for the future of technology slowly unfolded - far beyond the scope of a simple file browser… the Filing Tree was only the beginning of Links. Links - that’s what I came to call it. A blueprint, a pattern for how certain technological tools should be developed to work together, and, perhaps, the name for a specific future operating system designed upon those precepts.

As I progressed through college, the ideas began to be less vague. I pieced together how I could design an algorithm for the tree visualization I sought, and even as I began working on prototyping it, began making a GridTree, various other pieces also fell into place. I found myself fitting pieces of technology together in my head, pieces which had hitherto not achieved their full potential, lacking sufficient utility apart, but which it appears will be powerful when brought together.

I think it was in my final year of college, one last big piece came, and everything sort of clicked together, felt whole - just fit, each synergystically better when unified with the others. And while details have continued to fill in since, I somehow knew, then, that I had all of the major pieces to Links.

Now, in grad school, I finally have the chance to work on it regularly, as my research. Here, I’m working on one part of that grand whole - the algorithms and data structures behind the Filing Tree - one little piece that alone is enough to fill an entire dissertation, and more. I’ve got a long way to go. But, it has been incredible, and fulfilling, to finally begin to see things which have been in my head, which I could see so clearly in my mind’s eye, now taking shape and slowly becoming truly real. And it is very much like how I imagined it. (When does that ever happen?)

And so, the journey begins.

I have sometime since come to realize, that even that fateful evening in Belgium wasn’t the beginning of this unusual mission. You see, I remember that, as a child, I had at some point wanted to create a computer operating system. At the time I re-imagined the user interface, thinking about how I could make it better - more suited to my kid-brain desires, with a more fun, interactive desktop. And such interface ideas came not just once, but numerous times, in various small ways! While the specific ideas were the imaginings of a child, forgotten for many years between, it is astounding and telling to think how, even as a boy, my play so foreshadowed my later dreams and work. So, this then begs the question - was even that the beginning?

I believe that the veil between heaven and earth is often thin for children. In them, one can ofttimes see glimpses of who they were before this life. As any attentive parent of multiple children might attest, children come ‘preprogrammed’ (a poor term, given my utter disbelief in any form of determinism) - malleable, yes, but not grown from scratch. No, they come with too much self, too much preexisting personality, too different from every other being around, to be patterned wholly after their progenitors. While I do not believe we are predetermined or predestined in any way, I do believe in foreordination. That we come, often, with missions to be performed in life, if we are faithful and so choose.

Was I, then, foreordained to this? I hardly dare ask. I recognize the folly in assuming any mundane task to be of too much importance; I know that I must still place my God, my faith, and my family in priority over all such other parts of my life, and nor must I confound the spiritual with the intellectual, lest I make something other than Christ my god. But, recognizing those greater bounds, it does yet seem that, within its proper sphere, Links may indeed be an inspired plan that existed before I came to earth. And, who knows? Perhaps I even had a hand in its initial devising, untold centuries before now, when the foundations of the Earth were formed, and the Great Plan of Happiness was laid. Perhaps, one day, I’ll have the chance to ask. Until then, I am content to move forward on faith, believing simply that this is a good work to do - and to let that be enough for me, for now.

And, to quote Thomas S. Monson, I will “find joy in the journey”.