“WorldWideWeb is a hypertext browser/editor which allows one to read information from local files and remote servers. It allows hypertext links to be made and traversed, and also remote indexes to be interrogated for lists of useful documents. Local files may be edited, and links made from areas of text to other files, remote files, remote indexes, remote index searches, internet news groups and articles. All these sources of information are presented in a consistent way to the reader. For example, an index search returns a hypertext document with pointers to documents matching the query. Internet news articles are displayed with hypertext links to other referenced articles and groups…This project is experimental and of course comes without any warranty whatsoever. However, it could start a revolution in information access.” — Tim Berners-Lee in comp.sys.next.announce (via Horace Dediu)
“The whole web is built on one mistake after another. We have this big pile of accidents.” — Douglas Crockford in “Coders at Work”
“
It’s not just temporary. Now that it works you’re not going to touch it because something else depends on that behavior and touching it will be far too risky. You’re probably not going to clean it up, except perhaps to put it under the bed and hope no one trips over it later.
Even on a tight schedule, last-minute block-ship bugs appear and what should have been a simple, straightforward bug fix will turn into some Giger-esque state-driven nightmare causing everyone associated with the project to invent new profanities because the ones they have don’t seem emphatic enough.
In the next release a new feature will be impossible to implement because class A has intimate, incestuous, biblical knowledge about class B. It seemed to work but the child of this relationship is going to cause you problems for the rest of its life even if you manage to separate the star-crossed classes and send them back to their families.
” —Chris Parker (Apple frameworks engineer): You Are Not Ruthless Enough
I’ve seen the kind of long term damage this sort of cruft can inflict on a code base many times, which is why, like Parker, I tend to believe strongly in investing the extra time necessary to design good class interfaces, properly separate concerns, and get application architecture as right as I can given the knowledge I have at the time. I think one of the biggest things my time at Apple taught me was the NeXT-ian philosophy of building applications as thin layers and thinking of the lower level code in terms of frameworks as much as possible.
I for one welcome our new unicorn overlords.
(via topherchris)
“Fordlandia isn’t just the story of a plantation; it’s a story about Ford’s ego. As disaster after disaster struck, Ford continued to pour money into the project. Not one drop of latex from Fordlandia ever made it into a Ford car. But the more it failed, the more Ford justified the project in idealistic terms. “It increasingly was justified as a work of civilization, or as a sociological experiment,” Grandin says. One newspaper article even reported that Ford’s intent wasn’t just to cultivate rubber, but to cultivate workers and human beings. In the end, Ford’s utopia failed. Fordlandia’s residents, ever in hope their patriarch would someday visit their Midwestern industrial town in the middle of the jungle, gave up and left.” —
Fordlandia: The Failure Of Ford’s Jungle Utopia : NPR (via Patrick Ewing)
The story of Henry Ford’s failed Brazilian rubber plantation is a great cautionary tale about the danger of blindly assuming that what made you successful in one domain will automatically make you successful in others (see also: Alex Payne’s “On Business Madness”).
If you’ve ever wondered what’s involved in keeping Tumblr humming along, here’s a great overview courtesy of Blake Matheney.
(Source: mattlehrer, via codingjester)
“It is not, as it turns out, necessary to be a micromanaging psychopath with narcissistic personality disorder (or even to pretend to be one) if you just hire smart people and give them real authority. The saddest thing about the Steve Jobs hagiography is all the young “incubator twerps” strutting around Mountain View deliberately cultivating their worst personality traits because they imagine that’s what made Steve Jobs a design genius. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc, young twerp. Maybe try wearing a black turtleneck too. For every Steve Jobs, there are a thousand leaders who learned to hire smart people and let them build great things in a nurturing environment of empowerment and it was AWESOME. That doesn’t mean lowering your standards. It doesn’t mean letting people do bad work. It means hiring smart people who get things done—and then getting the hell out of the way.” —
A VC: The Management Team - Guest Post From Joel Spolsky
Pretty much my sentiments exactly.
David Cole responds to my previous post about San Francisco:
California is gentle and tolerant, but to me that’s the more honest route. I don’t relate at all to the notion that one should be calling others out on their bullshit. Life is far too vast and one’s personal experiences are far too narrow for me to feel comfortable with the idea that anyone has it all figured out. To suggest otherwise seems like the narcissistic route.
Perhaps, and I do sometimes worry I’ve become a bit too unhealthily preoccupied with this stuff. But just keep this in mind: the people toward whom you are adopting this highly evolved, West Coast, live-and-let-live attitude are going to be your co-workers, your boss (or trying very hard to be your boss), your peers, your social network, the people you see at Zeitgeist every weekend whether you want to or not. Their actions will affect you—particularly when you’re in the pressure cooker environment of a startup with them. I’ve seen drama go down in SF startups that would shock people who are fed a steady diet of “In SF, everyone’s shiny and happy and inventing the future and wearing amazing socks” crap by the press. I’ve seen festering interpersonal problems go unresolved and toxic people allowed to run amuck to the extent that it has done real damage to promising companies. These kinds of problems aren’t unique to SF, of course, and in some ways come with the territory in startups. But I feel like I’ve never found myself slapping my forehead and thinking “Can you believe this shit?” like I have in SF.
Besides, I think there’s actually a real value to stumbling into things wide-eyed and ignorant, unsure of who and what to believe. Jeff Veen once told me that he credits a lot of his success to not knowing what he was getting into. By the time the problems inherent in type licensing and technology became clear, Typekit had enough momentum to overcome them…More broadly, this is the reason why incumbents rarely continue to innovate. They know too much, and box themselves into predetermined modes of perception. The flip side to never saying someone is crazy is never saying they’re right.
This idea is, of course, a staple of Silicon Valley mythology going back to the 70s (Virginia Postrel makes the point very well in her essay “Resilience vs. Anticipation,” which I linked to in the previous post), and for good reason: it’s true. I’m as big a fan of this story as anyone—I absolutely devour histories of the early computer industry (John Markoff’s “What the Dormouse Said” is a great example if you’re curious) and devoutly wish I could have worked at Xerox PARC in the 1970s with one of my all-time heroes, Alan Kay. There absolutely is something to be said for the feeling of absolute potential you get living somewhere like SF or Silicon Valley—I still think of my first year living in Cupertino as one of the most magical times in my life. Just remember: that magic comes with a downside, which is basically what my previous post was about.
—@rsa
A little career advice for designers, courtesy of my brother.
(via implodr)
Jim Ray asks:
Honest question: have you found New York, center of the soul-less finance careerists and “new media” wankfest, to be different?
New York can certainly be a soulless place (just ask me about the time I ate at a sushi place in Midtown East and overheard a finance guy ask his date if she wanted to be with “the guy who has the villa on top of the hill or the guy who has the villa on the bottom of the hill”), and of course the irony isn’t lost on me that I subtly shifted Choire Sicha’s very New York media-centric diatribe to apply my experience with SF. But I think there are a couple of key saving graces to New York that prevent it from being the source of annoyance that SF has become to me personally: it’s too big of a city to be dominated by any one industry, culture, or peer group; and it’s historically a place that resists ever allowing you to feel like you’re special.
There’s an interview with Bill Murray I just happened to see on Joy Behar’s CNN show (probably in a hotel room) a few years ago, and one of the things he said really stuck with me:
I’ll give you my whole wrap on fame, I think everyone becomes a jerk for about two years when they become famous. And you get to—I give you—so I give people two years to figure it out and pull it together.
This reminds me a bit of my experience with San Francisco, because I think part of the problem with the place is that there’s absolutely nothing in the culture that puts the brakes on people’s narcissism. It is, by its very nature, an infinitely gentle, endlessly indulgent place (see Virginia Postrel’s wonderful essay on Silicon Valley weather) that encourages people to believe at every turn that they are exceptional human beings for having been enlightened enough to make their home in God’s perfect paradise at the dawning of the Age of the Technological Aquarius.
I often tell the story of how, on a flight home from one of my visits to the Square offices in SF a few years ago, I sat next to a woman who told me the dramatic story of how she managed to escape a controlling, loveless marriage to an Italo-Nigerian oil magnate straight out of Swiss boarding school and ended up fleeing to SF because she couldn’t think of anywhere else appropriately safe and nurturing to go (I’m currently considering pitching this idea to Wes Anderson). Likewise, I’ve always loved the story of how Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, a sickly Glaswegian lad struggling with chronic fatigue syndrome, found a welcoming and inspiring place to convalesce and pursue his nascent musical impulses in San Francisco. I myself owe lot, both personally and professionally, to my time in the Bay Area—I would in no respect be the person I am today with my time there, and in fact, I still think fondly of my first two years there as a magical, transformative time in my life. I miss the place. But over time, I realized that one of both the virtues and the problems with SF is that, basically since the Gold Rush times, it has always been a welcoming haven for people seeking to escape something, to reinvent themselves, to be their own person, to make a fortune on the frontier.
This is wonderful in many ways, but in my experience, there is also dark side to this admirably gentle, indulgent, enthusiastic culture: if you are a person who harbors any tendencies toward ridiculousness and narcissism, San Francisco has a way of bringing those traits to the fore in a major way. There are plenty of terrible people in New York, of course, but their narcissistic leanings tend to be kept in check by the natural hardships of life in the city, the size of the place, the variety of cultural and professional influences, and, frankly, the willingness (some might say eagerness) of New Yorkers to censure bad behavior.
A lot of what you need to know about SF can be explained by the fact that it is a small town, and that it is an industry town. In a place like SF, where you’re going to run into the same five people at Four Barrel every Saturday, where your dating history is likely to intersect with the dating history of 20% of the employees at your next startup, and where everyone around you is a source of investment, press, or general buzz for your next startup, people tend to be reluctant to speak ill of anyone. Which means people can often behave badly with full assurance of an invitation to the BBQ at Golden Gate Park next weekend.
New York is by no means perfect, and I’d be disingenuous to deny that it can be shallow, soulless place. But it’s a big enough city that I don’t really feel like I have to deal with that on a day-to-day basis if I don’t want to, and to the extent that I do I’ll take straightforward shallowness over unchecked narcissism masquerading as progressivism any day. At this point, I’m well on my way to having lived in NYC longer than I lived in the Bay Area.