CATLab CATLab Director's Note: Summer 2021
Welcome to the CATLab Director's Note Newsletter! I'll be sending these out periodically to update CATLab alumni, donors, and partners on what we've been up to and the achievements of our students. I can't wait to hear what you think!
In this edition, featured in the 2021 CATLab Magazine, I consider an interesting metaphor for our work here at CATLab.
-Zak
I’ve become a bit obsessed with the Ship of Theseus ever since I learned of this thought experiment in Disney's spring series, WandaVision. The show writers summarize the thought experiment like this: "The Ship of Theseus is an artifact in a museum. Over time, its planks of wood rot and are replaced with new planks. When no original plank remains, is it still the ship of Theseus?" This summer, I'm asking myself this question about Westmont.
The CATLab is dismantling and reassembling at least two dozen apps built over twenty years by Greg Smith, the salt-of-the-earth programmer who has become a legend on Westmont's campus, and who retired two years ago.
Greg's apps were written on a now-end-of-life Apple product, but they are still running the school. For the last decade, these forms have been the lifeblood of getting stuff done at Westmont. If you wanted to hire a new staff member, look up a person's phone number, apply to a spring break trip, or create a club, you had to go through Greg Smith's forms.
In late April 2021, twenty bright-eyed Westmont students stared down at me from their seats in a Winter Science classroom resembling the U.N. room, masked and eager to hear what they'd be working on over summer.
On Westmont, I said.
Our work this summer is to take apart Greg Smith apps one at a time. Like planks on the ship of Theseus, we're making something sophisticated and new using the modern platform of Salesforce, and then fitting that new plank back onto our existing ship.
As we clock in and out this summer, filing into our chic space in Westmont Downtown, I think we are actually more like Greg Smith than Tony Stark. We're not Ray-Ban-wearing, Tesla-driving rock stars so much as we're crusty shipbuilders, clocking in and out in the yard. One plank off, another on. Ones and zeros. Nails and tar. La Croix and sack lunches.
As director of the program, I now think of CATLab as one of the great shipyards of higher education in this country. Young shipbuilders come here to learn the craft, and then they move on. But they are here for a few formative years. By contributing earnestly and faithfully, this student has swung a hammer to shape this vessel, an institution held together by a mission to educate with a cohesive worldview.
In biblical days, the disciples were seafaring folk. Maybe we, the shipwrights, can learn a thing or two about becoming fishers of men as we enable our ship to sail the seas of time to a destination yet unknown.
I hope our ship has another eighty years in her.