Thorstein Veblen

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The gesture that kept nagging me was one nobody talks about in tech.

A carpenter running her hand along a joint she just cut. The square already confirmed it. The level already confirmed it. The hand adds nothing the instruments haven't already provided. She does it anyway. Not for the client. Not for the inspection. For herself — because something in her needs to feel that the work is right.

I have spent my entire career surrounded by people who do the equivalent of that gesture every day. The engineer who refactors code that already works because it isn't *clean* yet. The designer who adjusts a margin by two pixels because the spacing doesn't *feel* right. The product lead who kills a feature that tested well because something in