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.

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.

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[1] Actually happened to me once.

I’m back from Alaska. Actually, I was back a week and a half ago but was bogged down in trying to get some projects done plus had some family in town. Since the mobile world has been so quiet lately there wasn’t anything urgent. I have a lot of thoughts written down on various topics that I will share over the next week or two, but for now I thought you’d enjoy some photos I took while in Seward and the Kenai Peninsula.

This is my third trip to Alaska, along with my wife, but first for my girls. They are finally old enough (7 and 5) to remember these trips so we hope to start doing them regularly. We flew into Anchorage and drove the 2.5 hours to Seward. We stayed in a place with a kitchen, saving us on food costs, and traveled around the area, including a voyage out on the Gulf of Alaska. I took all of these photos with the iPhone 5 I had in my pocket. Not bad for a point-and-shoot.

I live in the Northwest. We’ve seen mountains here but nothing like Alaska. These aren’t big mountains by Alaska standards where, on the mainland, peaks of 16,000 feet are left off the maps, but they are everywhere. If you ever get the chance to go I highly recommend it.

When I turned 30 my wife and I went to Alaska to celebrate (actually our second trip there as our first was our honeymoon). We had an amazing time and said when she turned 30 three years later we’d go back. Well, life got in the way. Two kids, a new house, a very different Infinity Softworks and nine years later, we are finally going back. On my way out the door I thought I’d share a number of extremely thought-provoking articles for you to read. This should be enough to tide you over until I return.

Fred Wilson and Mark Suster wrote some great strategy articles over the past couple of weeks. I recommend reading them in order. We have:

• Product > Strategy > Business Model by Fred Wilson
• Why Startups Need a Well Articulated Strategy (And How to Think About Yours) by Mark Suster
• What Is Strategy? by Fred Wilson

Derek Sivers wrote a post on the rules, or rather, the fact that there are no rules called No Rules In This Game. After all if the rules matter none of us would start companies.

Speaking of start-ups, Steve Blank wrote a post called Fund Raising Is A Means Not An End. Too many companies think fund raising is the event. It’s not. The product, the market, the job to be done, those things matter. Fund raising is just a way to get there.

Speaking of product, here is something we’ve all done: prioritized feature lists. Ken Norton writes why they are poison in Babe Ruth and Feature Lists. Ken includes a wonderful example from his days running Google Apps. (via Om Malik)

George Will had a thought-provoking article on the American Dream and the role of education called America’s Broken Bootstraps. In short, it won’t be good enough to have a college degree. In the future, my kids will need the right college degree.

Finally, I’ll link you to two excellent business stories, one on the destruction of Kodak and another on a rising Twilio. I highly recommend both of these, too:

• The Rise and Fall of Kodak by Kenny Suleimanagich (via MG Seigler)
• From Zero to Half-A-Billion: CEO Jeff Lawson Writes The Perfect Story For Twilio by Om Malik

See you when I get back!

I have two things to say about the NSA gathering data from every major Internet social and e-commerce service, assuming it is true. Thing #1:

I wish I felt differently, but why does all this feel like we are whistling into the wind? The elected officials keep us focused on gay rights and abortion while it figures out who its enemies are in the name of security through every online service in the country, of which we willingly submitted all of our data and information. In another month, most of us will move onto the next government atrocity (or pseudo-atrocity). Saddened? Yes. But the ’60s are over and the hippies became yuppies. Surprised? Not one bit.

And thing #2:

There’s somethin’ happenin’ here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Tellin’ me, I got to beware

…

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away

Okay, so I didn’t say the latter. Stephen Stills of Buffalo Springfield did almost 50 years ago. Some things don’t change.

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Updated: apparently maybe not true. Glad I added that caveat originally. All the same, my sentiment doesn’t change.