Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh
(via frijole)
A poem by beat poet Gary Snyder, as published in today’s New York Times:
Because it broods under its hood like a perched falcon,
Because it jumps like a skittish horse and sometimes throws me,
Because it is poky when cold,
Because plastic is a sad, strong material that is charming to rodents,
Because it is flighty,
Because my mind flies into it through my fingers,
Because it leaps forward and backward, is an endless sniffer and searcher,
Because its keys click like hail on a boulder,
And it winks when it goes out,
And puts word-heaps in hoards for me, dozens of pockets of gold under boulders in streambeds, identical seedpods strong on a vine, or it stores bins of bolts;
And I lose them and find them,
Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly laid out and then highlighted and vanish in a flash at “delete,” so it teaches of impermanence and pain;
And because my computer and me are both brief in this world, both foolish, and we have earthly fates,
Because I have let it move in with me right inside the tent,
And it goes with me out every morning;
We fill up our baskets, get back home,
Feel rich, relax, I throw it a scrap and it hums.
For years now, whenever the subject of open source product design has come up in conversation, I’ve mentioned this 2005 Malcolm Gladwell New Yorker piece about Steve Gundrum, a tech-minded Silicon Valley baker who decided to pit three software development methodologies (open source, XP, and traditional hierarchical R&D) against each other in a battle to develop the ultimate low-fat cookie.
If you’ve followed the history of projects like Chandler, you’ll probably recognize the “Dream Team” of expert bakers convened by Gundrum as his “open source” group falling into the same sorts of traps (a lack of coherent vision, a reluctance to discount any idea, an obsession with novel and exotic techniques, a mounting frustration as individual contributors struggle to be heard). In the end, they turn in a passable but uninspiring product, while the traditional R&D team wins the competition by acting on a bit of clever insight from its leader.
Cookie baking isn’t a perfect analogy to software development, but I’ve always loved this article because it cleverly illustrates why open source tends to produce competent products that no one really loves, while the traditional R&D approach used by companies like Apple produces the iPod and iPhone. Plus, you learn a lot about the amount of engineering that goes into snack food.