“When I made Dune, I didn’t have final cut. It was a huge, huge sadness, because I felt I had sold out, and on top of that, the film was a failure at the box office. If you do what you believe in and have a failure, that’s one thing: you can still live with yourself. But if you don’t, it’s like dying twice. It’s very, very painful.
“There are no tiny features when you’re doing things properly.
“Look, I love programming. I also believe programming is important … in the right context, for some people. But so are a lot of skills. I would no more urge everyone to learn programming than I would urge everyone to learn plumbing.
Jeff Atwood, “Please Don’t Learn To Code” (via evan)
I’ve been a bit reluctant to write about it for fear of sounding like an elitist spoilsport, but something has always rubbed me just slightly the wrong way about the current “everyone should learn to program!” meme. One one hand, I absolutely agree with Whitney McNamara that a certain amount of programming savvy is essential for managers in the tech industry. And I’ve long been of the opinion that schools should teach all kids some form of programming because, as Steve Jobs observed, programming teaches you how to think. So of course I would never discourage anyone who sincerely wants to learn how to program.
I guess the problem for me is that I perceive a slight flipness to a lot of people’s “I’m learning to code!” declarations—as if it’s just another entrepreneurial skill you can pick up on the fly, like learning to pitch VCs or read term sheets. I’ve been programming since I was in high school (well, really since I was a kid if you count C64 BASIC), I studied programming as a CS student in college, learned at the feet of some true masters at Apple, and I can tell you with some certainty that it’s only been in the last three or four years that I’ve been really, truly good at it. My worry is that a lot of startup types will learn enough through “code school” initiatives to think they “know” programming, but not enough to really appreciate the difference between programming and engineering (a difference I think is already a bit under appreciated in startupland).
By all means, learn enough programming to put together a prototype and have a better perspective on hiring and managing engineers. Just don’t mistake a foothold in the world of coding for true engineering expertise.
Airborne (oil on panel), by Brooklyn-based artist Alex Roulette.
I really love these paintings. Sort of a mixture of Robert Bechtle and Andrew Wyeth with the slightest bit of surrealism thrown in.
“Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.
W.H. Auden (via brysonian)
It’s as if Auden anticipated the genre of “glib startup advice” blogging.
(via rickwebb)
“Tasks are the weeds micromanagers mistake as beautiful flowers in groupware.
“In my time working [at Apple], I must personally have seen years-worth, probably decades-worth (and, from afar perhaps even centuries-worth) of work simply discarded because it turned out not to be ‘right’ or ‘good’. This was done with very little animosity towards the people who did the work. There was a distinct difference between working on something that turned out bad and had to be discarded (fine - admirable, even) and doing bad work (bad)…I think this highlights two things that many other organisations would do well to learn. First, what you have is what it is, it’s not the effort that was put into it. If it’s not worth keeping, it’s not worth keeping. Second, if you want the best results, you need to give good people the room to start over without feeling like they are failing.
“When people want a native app, they are asking for an app user experience, which is more complex than the web experience. For instance, users want apps to load immediately. That requires a client side cache, which is inherently more complex than a stateless client. There are no silver bullets to solve essential complexity. Trying to abstract away essential complexity only makes things more complex.
Ben Sandofsky: Shell Apps and Silver Bullets
Based on my own experience and recent discussions with many of my peers, I think this is a very under appreciated point right now in the startup world. Many web-centric managers and engineering organizations are confronting the “essential complexity” of native app development for the first time since Netscape ushered in an age of lightweight clients, and the response is often to try to force native app development into a familiar web-like mold without regard to the differences inherent in native apps. If you want to develop truly great, Apple-like native experiences, be ready to engage with some serious complexity.
The New York Moon, a project of mine and a number of others, has released an issue.
This whole thing (designed by Tumblr’s Zack Sultan) is gorgeous. I particularly enjoyed the piece about Newgate Prison, which was once located where NYC’s fashionable Meatpacking District now stands.
“And Technology Review? We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted $124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit. I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.
Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps - Technology Review (via Jason Kottke)
This is precisely what I’ve been saying for awhile now (see my interview with Pixel Union and my SXSW panel for examples). It seems insane to me that publishers today feel compelled to run complex native development efforts for multiple platforms, particularly when we’ve been developing an incredibly sophisticated abstraction for networked content delivery for nearly 20 years now: the web. I would argue that even within the tech industry proper, few traditionally web-oriented companies actually have the stomach for the complexity and comparatively long development cycles of first class native mobile development. If pure tech companies with the resources of Facebook are falling back to web-based or hybrid native/web approaches for their mobile apps, it’s unlikely that native development is a viable option for publishers.
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