The Creation Engine No. 2
A Testimony
Thu 19 March 2026 by Jim Purbrick
I grew up going to a little 13th century church in Bushey. There was a lot of talking and listening. I enjoyed listening to testimonies the most: ordinary people talking about how Christian ideas had helped them to live their lives. The stories helped the big ideas feel more personal, relatable and relevant.
I was reminded of this last week, when I met Thaer, one of my former Facebook colleagues. We naturally ended up talking a lot about the past and present of Facebook (now Meta) London. I mentioned that one of the reasons I left Facebook was that I wanted to stop flying and felt that I couldn’t successfully do my job if I wasn’t prepared to fly to New York and Menlo Park pretty often.
Thaer was amused: his immediate reaction was that sacrificing a sweet job at a tech company to make a principled stand against air travel was nuts. Although Thaer cared about the environment, as an engineer he could see that the savings in greenhouse gas emissions were negligible. No fewer planes had flown as a result of my actions and I would be better off seeing if I could help make sustainable air travel a reality.
I accepted Thaer’s arguments, but pointed out that my principled stand also allowed the conversation we were having to happen. I no longer preach fire and brimstone to people for living unsustainably (apologies to my family for earlier blunders), but do share my story when the opportunity arises.
I haven’t flown since 2019 and honestly it hasn’t felt like much of a sacrifice. I have had success working as the CTO for a tech startup after letting the CEO and COO know that I wouldn’t be able to fly for business, I have been able to spend more time with my family and I have enjoyed some lovely holidays by train to France, Spain and Belgium last week. I understand that not flying would be a much bigger sacrifice for many people with family abroad, but there are also many people in a similar position to mine who could make a similar sacrifice pretty painlessly: enough people to quickly reduce the number of flights taking off during a climate emergency.
Christians changed the world by sharing their good news. People in Parisian coffee shops talked about how it might be nice to stop living in the dark ages. Last week Thaer and I met in London and talked about how it might be time to stop living unsustainably. The change I made might seem laughably insignificant, but stories can be powerful; conversations can be powerful; the Internet can make those stories and conversations more powerful. There are second order effects.
(Christians also understood that music can make stories more powerful. This is the story of the my final flight for Facebook along with some lovely flute playing by my son Natty)
In 2012 I met Philip Su at Browns in Covent Garden to talk about setting up a Facebook engineering office in London. When I left Facebook there were over a thousand of engineering staff working in London and I had interviewed a thousand more. One of Philip’s favourite reminders in those early days when things felt daunting was that everything that was ever done in the world was started by one individual.
We can be the change we want to see in the world and by sharing our stories we can make those changes bigger.
Thanks for reading and listening to my stories, please share them with others who might find them encouraging.
BL:AM
After The Spirit of Gravity in February I ended up talking to Jason Hotchkiss and Jo Summers. I knew Jason from a Build Brighton guitar pedal workshop years ago and as a sound artist from Sound Plotting, but Jo knew Jason as the game developer who made 1D Pong. After …
read moreHow (Not) to Build a Metaverse
Earlier in the year I helped Josh Sanburn and his team put together a podcast series on building Second Life for the Wall Street Journal called “How To Build a Metaverse” which I’m now really enjoying. It’s great to hear all of the amazing stories about the origin …
read moreVirtual Worlds, Real People
Last week I gave a lab talk to my former research colleagues at the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham about the work I’ve been doing since leaving the lab over 20 years ago. Rather than talk about technology I focussed on the lessons that todays efforts …
read moreVirtual Objects You Can Touch
Now that Horizon Workrooms has launched I’m very happy to be able to write about the functionality that I found most exciting while building the experience: the mapping of virtual objects to their real world counterparts.
Typically augmented and mixed reality experiences overlay real world objects with virtual annotations …
read moreThe Art Of Social VR
The recording of my recent Stereopsia 2020 talk about the art of designing social VR experiences is now online. The talk summarises a lot of material covered in more depth in my posts on The Conversation Around Content, A Tall Dark Stranger and Small Places Loosely Joined, so if please …
read moreA Past And Present Future Of Work
Over the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time helping people new to virtual worlds learn how they work. Over the last few weeks I’ve been sharing a series of short posts on some of the high level concepts I covered which will hopefully be useful …
read moreSmall Places Loosely Joined
Over the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time helping people new to virtual worlds learn how they work. Over the next few weeks I’m sharing a series of short posts on some of the high level concepts I covered which will hopefully be useful to …
read moreA Tall Dark Stranger
Over the past few years I’ve spent a lot of time helping people new to virtual worlds understand how they work. Over the next few weeks I’m going to share a series of short posts on some of the high level concepts I covered which will hopefully be …
read moreThe Conversation Around Content
Over the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time helping people new to virtual worlds learn how they work. Over the next few weeks I’m going to share a series of short posts on some of the high level concepts I covered which will hopefully be …
read moreHTTPS
Before my recent post about leaving Facebook, it had been a while since I’d updated The Creation Engine and it turned out I had some housekeeping to do. After pushing the Pelican output to https://github.com/jimpurbrick/jimpurbrick.github.com I got a mail from GitHub saying that …
read more0 to 1
8 years ago London was hosting the Olympics and I met Philip Su for the first time at Browns in Covent Garden to talk about the engineering office Facebook was planning to open in London. By the end of this year Facebook London will have thousands of people working in …
read moreThis blog is 10
Just over ten years ago I set up The Creation Engine No. 2 after previously blogging on the original Linden Lab hosted Creation Engine and before that on Terra Nova. So, while I’ve been blogging for almost 14 years, 10 years of The Creation Engine No. 2 seems like …
read moreReplicated Redux: The Movie
The recording of my recent React Europe talk about Replicated Redux is now online and I’ve written several other posts describing designing, testing and generalising the library if you would like to know more about the details. If you’d like to play the web version of pairs or …
read moreReplaying Replicated Redux
While property based tests proved to be a powerful tool for finding
and fixing problems with ReactVR
pairs,
the limitations of the simplistic clientPredictionConstistenty
mechanism remained.
It’s easy to think of applications where one order of a sequence of actions is valid, but another order is invalid. Imagine an …
read moreBuilding Safety in to Social VR
Last year I hosted a panel on creating a safe environment for people in VR with Tony Sheng and Darshan Shankar at OC3. I commented at the time that the discussion reminded me of the story of LambdaMOO becoming a self-governing community told by Julian Dibbell in My Tiny Life …
read moreTesting Replicated Redux
Opening a couple of browser windows and clicking around was more than sufficient for testing the initial version of ReactVR pairs. Implementing a simple middleware to log actions took advantage of the Redux approach of reifying events to allow a glance at the console to reveal precisely which sequence of …
read moreReactVR Redux Revisited
There were a couple of aspects of my previous experiments building networked ReactVR experiences with Redux that were unsatisfactory: there wasn’t a clean separation between the application logic and network code and, while the example exploited idempotency to reduce latency for some actions, actions which could generate conflicts used …
read moreGeneration JPod
I’ve just got back from Kaş where I spent a lovely few days celebrating Pinar and Simon’s wedding and while there spent a few hours reading Now We Are 40: a thoughtful and entertaining look at everything from house music to house prices from the perspective of Generation …
read more2² Decades
Several years ago when we were in 100 robots together, Max was celebrating his 40th birthday. When I said that mine would be in 2017, it felt like an impossibly far future date, but, after what feels like the blink of an eye, here we are.
Along with many other …
read more