Yearly Archives: 2013

Good Reads III

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Periodically I get backed up. There are a number of really good posts but I just don’t have a lot to say about any of them. Since I don’t really want this blog to be a link blog, I try to only link individually to those I have something to add. Given that, though, there are a number of posts lately worthy of your attention. So I include them here, all at once, for your enjoyment:

  • Do Things That Don’t Scale by Paul Graham. Paul writes some amazing essays and this is no exception. I’m a sucker for contrarian thinking, though. Paul talks in depth about doing the little things no matter how time consuming, especially in the early days of a new business or product. Don’t worry, he says, if they don’t scale. Once product/market fit is achieved you can figure that out.
  • Why You Need To Ring The Freaking Cash Register by Mark Suster. Great post on why you don’t know your business until you take the customer’s money.
  • The Sweet Smell Of Success by Seth Godin. I like this section best: “You will be labeled, like it or not. If you earn the label of, ‘person who builds things, ships them and sells them to someone who values them…’ you’re way ahead of the pack. You’re going to be doing this for a long time.” I sometimes wonder how I’ll be remembered. I hope it’s for shipping great products that are used by lots of customers.
  • The Idea Maze by Chris Dixon.  The latest conventional wisdom is that the idea doesn’t matter. I never understood this. The idea, I think, is critical. Without it there is no business. Chris Dixon takes the conventional wisdom to task.
  • Why Mobile Web Apps Are Slow by Drew Crawford. Fascinating in depth and technical discussion about the state of Javascript in web browsers, especially mobile ones. I partly agree with him. Javascript is slower in mobile web browsers (and I’m in no position to discuss the future.) But he talks about Javascript in browsers in extreme cases like photo and video editing. I’m writing hybrid apps as we speak and Javascript performs admirably on both desktop and mobile web browsers for my usage. As with all things in life, pick wisely as mileage may vary.
  • The Leaping Startup by William Mougayar. My first time linking here to William but he has an incredible investigative mind. Why, he asks, do some companies explode after product/market fit and some struggle? One possibility: listening too closely to your customers.

 

Jeff Bezos And The Future Of News

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Jeff Bezos, in a memo to Washington Post employees after he purchased the company:

The values of The Post do not need changing. The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners. We will continue to follow the truth wherever it leads, and we’ll work hard not to make mistakes. When we do, we will own up to them quickly and completely.

Once upon a time, when towns were small, all news was passed over the fence, neighbor to neighbor. Did you hear about the Johnson girl? I didn’t but I did hear that there’s a sale down at the general store.

As towns grew bigger the dissemination of news became more centralized and the desire for a single news source increased. The town paper had authority and ethics and all the things we expect from a paper of record.

As the towns grew into cities it was no longer good enough for that paper to just provide the local sports scores and happenings on Main Street on Saturday night. Now it had to provide national news as well. Every city bigger than a couple  hundred thousand people had a paper with both national and local news. Every paper, outside of the evening news, became the source for all information.

And then the Internet came along and suddenly we could get national news from anywhere. This diminished the value proposition of the local paper and that diminishing value meant diminishing financial returns.

You know all this, of course. It’s been discussed ad nauseum for years now.

I believe, however, that at some point we will reach a tipping point where local papers become local papers again and a few national papers become the paper-of-record for US news. At this point it is clear that three papers have the ability to make it as national news sites (paper will go away) of record: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Others may survive also — The LA Times, The Atlanta Constitution, the Miami Herald — but these are the three worth betting on.

A massive overhaul will be required, a re-organization of the mission and goals of these venerable institutions. But if I was a betting man — one with an interest in journalism and money to burn like Jeff Bezos — a bet on one of the Big Three sure makes for an interesting play.

 

The Big “Mo”

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The last seven days have been some of the most productive of my professional career. We had been having a problem with the underlying code for our new product for a long time. The bugs we found were very hard to track down and even harder to fix. Every time we fixed one it seemed to create three more.

A week ago it finally reached a head and we were forced to re-write the entire way it is handled. My designer came up with a new approach and I sat down to implement it.

Over the course of seven days I caught what can only big described as the Big Mo: momentum. Everything fell into place, every trick I tried worked exactly as I had hoped it would, every search term I typed into Google returned the answers I was looking for.

If you don’t code you may not understand what I’m getting at. It’s the equivalent of a baseball 6 for 6 with four home runs day. It’s the equivalent of taking your dead car to the mechanic and finding out it was a $0.50 screw that he replaced for free [1].

As my coding partner in crime said, when you’ve got momentum, keep going. So I did.

I wrote code for seven straight days. When I wasn’t writing code I was thinking about writing code. When I slept I dreamed about code.

Last Wednesday, after seven days, I completed the last piece of the primary puzzle and shut down my code editor for the night. I was exhausted. But it didn’t hit me until Thursday morning. I was far more than exhausted. I was burned out.

So I shut things down for a few days to refresh. I had meetings all day Thursday and worked on other things Friday and didn’t turn on the computer all weekend.

Once upon a time I could write code 60-80 hours per week for months on end. But now I turn 40 a month from today and I just can’t put in intensive weeks like that any more. I still work constantly, but writing code is a different story.

I’ve always been a big momentum guy. I don’t want to stop once I get on a roll. In my forties, though, I hope to do a better job of controlling that instinct.

—

[1] Actually happened to me once.

I Don’t Know What I’m Doing

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Bret Victor, presenting in the present as if he was speaking from the past at the DBX conference, said this:

The message of this talk is if you want to be open and receptive, to invent new ways of thinking, I think the first step is you have to say to yourself, “I don’t know what I’m doing. We as a field don’t know what we are doing.” I think we have to say, “we don’t know what programming is, we don’t know what computing is, we don’t even know what a computer is.” And once you truly understand that and once you truly believe that then you are free and you can think anything.

If you don’t follow Bret’s work, he is one of the most fascinating thinkers, programmers and designers in computer science today. Substitute other terms for ‘programming,’ ‘computing’ and ‘computer’ and we have a simple recipe for every disruptive innovation in the history of the world.

The path to invention is the willful ignorance of everything we knew before.

Fast Time and the Aging Mind

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John Gruber linked to this article from the New York Time on our perception of time as we age:

Here’s a possible answer: think about what it’s like when you learn something for the first time — for example how, when you are young, you learn to ride a bike or navigate your way home from school. It takes time to learn new tasks and to encode them in your memory. And when you are learning about the world for the first time, you are forming a fairly steady stream of new memories of events, places and people.

My grandfather, who died two years ago at age 93, used to say that things moved faster when you are older because it is, in fact, actually less of your life. When we are 2 going on 3, that’s 33% of our lives but when we are 49 going on 50, that’s only 2%. This came from a man who decided to learn the computer at age 85. So I think it is reasonable to assume that the article’s author is more accurate than my grandfather on this one.