One day I found a note on my desk at home. I had no memory of writing it, but the handwriting was unmistakably mine. “I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING”, it said. The note took me by surprise, but I couldn’t fault its accuracy. In this talk I’ll confirm that I have no idea what I’m doing, and explain why that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’ll touch on evolutionary biology, the impostor syndrome, the Dunning–Kruger effect, test-driven development, material exploration, beavers, judo and Douglas Adams. By the end I hope to have convinced you that wilful ignorance is a vital ingredient of human creativity, and therefore of programmer creativity, because a programmer is a type of human.