David Lynch passed away in January 2025, shortly after being evacuated from his Los Angeles home due to the Southern California wildfires. He’s perhaps best known for the groundbreaking TV series Twin Peaks, which inspired countless shows, including The X-Files, The Sopranos, and Lost.
Lynch was genuinely a good human being who cared deeply for his actors and crew. He discovered extraordinary talent like Naomi Watts, who had struggled to land a major role in a Hollywood movie after 10 years of auditioning. From the interviews he gave, it quickly becomes apparent that he respected people of all kinds and never put anyone down – even those who truly deserved it.
Lynch is famous for refusing to explain his movies. Although not a fan of his previous work, the great film critic Roger Ebert once wrote that Mulholland Drive remained compulsively watchable while refusing to yield to interpretation.
While Lynch offered very little in terms of what his movies meant, he was generous in sharing his views on creativity, work, and life in general. As a tribute to Lynch, I’d like to share my perspective on his life lessons from a software developer’s viewpoint.
Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.
We’ve all got hundreds or even thousands of ideas floating around in our brains. But the really big ones are few and far between. Once you catch a good one –because they’re so rare– write it down immediately, says Lynch. From there, ideas attract other ideas and start to grow from their initial seed state. The final job is to translate those ideas into a medium, whether it’s a film, a painting, or software.
The idea is the whole thing. If you stay true to the idea, it tells you everything you need to know, really. You just keep working to make it look like that idea looked, feel like it felt, sound like it sounded, and be the way it was.
Software development is part art, part engineering. We don’t build the same software over and over again – virtually all software is crafted by hand, sometimes with help from AI. If you ask two developers to create a non-trivial program, it’s very likely that the programs they produce will be different, even if the functionality is the same. Under the hood, the programming language, data structures, and overall architecture may be completely different. And on the surface, the user interfaces may look nothing alike.
It’s a good habit to listen to what users have to say, but they often can only describe their problems – they rarely come up with good ideas to solve them. And that’s OK. It’s our job to find the right ideas, implement them well, and solve tricky problems in a way we, and hopefully the users, will love.
My friend Bushnell Keeler, who was really responsible for me wanting to be a painter, said you need four hours of uninterrupted time to get one hour of good painting in, and that is really true.
Like other creative fields, writing code requires deep concentration. We need to hold complex structures in our minds while working through problems. Switching between coding and other tasks disrupts flow – that magical state of mind where we lose track of time and produce code effortlessly. That’s why many developers hate meetings – they are toxic to our productivity.
I believe you need technical knowledge. And also, it’s really, really great to learn by doing. So, you should make a film.
Software development is one of those rare fields where a college degree isn’t required to succeed. Yes, we should all know the basics, but in my experience, new college graduates often lack the practical knowledge to be effective developers.
The real learning happens through hands-on experience: building real projects, debugging tricky problems, collaborating with teams, and maintaining code over time. It’s crucial to never stop learning, experimenting, and iterating on our craft.
Happy accidents are real gifts, and they can open the door to a future that didn’t even exist.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989, while working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Originally conceived to meet the demand for information sharing between scientists around the world, the web went mainstream within just a few years.
Linus Torvalds created Git due to a licensing dispute over BitKeeper, the original version control system used for Linux development. The need for a new tool led to Git becoming the most widely used version control system today.
I feel that a set should be like a happy family. Almost like Thanksgiving every day, happily going down the road together.
Be kind to your teammates, don’t embarrass them. They may not be perfect, but accept them for who they are. The most important trait of an effective software development team is psychological safety –that is, team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other, as corroborated by Google’s research on the subject.
It’s OK to make mistakes, as long as you learn from them. Knowing that your team has your back when things go south is a wonderful feeling.
Most of Hollywood is about making money - and I love money, but I don’t make the films thinking about money.
Just like Lynch prioritizes creativity over financial gain, some of the most impactful software projects started with an open source model, and they literally changed the world, such as Linux, PostgreSQL, and Node.js, just to name a few.
What makes these projects remarkable is that they didn’t emerge from corporate boardrooms – they were built by communities of passionate developers, collaborating across the world.
Money is just a means to an end. Unfortunately, many get this confused.
David, thank you for making the world a better place!
David Lynch in 2007 via Wikimedia Commons
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