Buzz Andersen

"When I made Dune, I didn’t have final cut. It was a huge, huge sadness, because I felt I had sold..."

Wed, 16 May 2012 08:19:54 -0700

“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.”

- David Lynch in Catching the Big Fish

"There are no tiny features when you’re doing things properly."

Wed, 16 May 2012 05:54:12 -0700

“There are no tiny features when you’re doing things properly.”

- There are no small changes | The Contrast Blog (via jericsinger)

Amen.

"Look, I love programming. I also believe programming is important … in the right context, for some..."

Tue, 15 May 2012 07:24:00 -0700

“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.

iateabee: Airborne (oil on panel), by Brooklyn-based artist...

Sun, 13 May 2012 07:51:00 -0700

iateabee:

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,..."

Sun, 13 May 2012 07:25:00 -0700

“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.

"Tasks are the weeds micromanagers mistake as beautiful flowers in groupware."

Thu, 10 May 2012 09:48:28 -0700

“Tasks are the weeds micromanagers mistake as beautiful flowers in groupware.”

- Adam Mathes

"In my time working [at Apple], I must personally have seen years-worth, probably decades-worth (and,..."

Thu, 10 May 2012 05:14:47 -0700

“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.”

- Jamie Montgomerie: Apple, Failure, and Perfect Cookies

"When people want a native app, they are asking for an app user experience, which is more complex..."

Tue, 08 May 2012 14:48:00 -0700

“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.

zsultan: The New York Moon, a project of mine and a number of...

Tue, 08 May 2012 12:09:00 -0700

zsultan:

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..."

Mon, 07 May 2012 14:01:00 -0700

“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.

"The first thing a leader needs to learn to do is communicate—tell his team where they’re going and..."

Mon, 07 May 2012 05:29:22 -0700

“The first thing a leader needs to learn to do is communicate—tell his team where they’re going and why. This is especially true when dozens of employees are being hired monthly, each with his own ideas about how to do things and what’s best for the company. After Zuckerberg stopped coding at Facebook, though, he didn’t communicate—he disappeared. He did so because he hadn’t yet learned another critical leadership skill: the art of saying “no.””

- The Maturation of Mark Zuckerberg — New York Magazine

"There is an entirely different order of product being developed here, far beyond the outer reaches..."

Thu, 03 May 2012 06:48:00 -0700

“There is an entirely different order of product being developed here, far beyond the outer reaches of irony. I first started seeing them in Google Image searches; the most random queries were returning pictures of t-shirts, trucker hats, and especially ties that were truly uncanny. One could not, by looking at them, decipher how they had come about, what possible thought process lay behind them, who they were for, or why anyone would want them. They had something akin to the lost-in-translation weirdness of Chinese Shanzhai culture, but what was being lost was in a language far more distant than Chinese; one got the impression the “designers” of these pieces were speaking strictly in ones and zeros. I had visions of design-bots, data mining for user patterns, instantaneously designing products based on trending search queries, generating t-shirts like predictive text and graphics through some kind of visual auto-tune. Amazingly, it turns out I am not totally wrong.”

- Spam-erican Apparel « DIS Magazine (via Michael McCracken)

Algorithmically created goods! The Horse Ebooks of Fashion! The Spam-ternet of Things! Paging New Aesthetic!

"My pragmatic summary: A large fraction of the flaws in software development are due to programmers..."

Wed, 02 May 2012 16:22:09 -0700

“My pragmatic summary: A large fraction of the flaws in software development are due to programmers not fully understanding all the possible states their code may execute in. In a multithreaded environment, the lack of understanding and the resulting problems are greatly amplified, almost to the point of panic if you are paying attention. Programming in a functional style makes the state presented to your code explicit, which makes it much easier to reason about, and, in a completely pure system, makes thread race conditions impossible.”

- John Carmack: Functional Programming in C++ (via Phillip Bowden)

This is the best, most pragmatic overview of functional programming I’ve ever seen. I’m accustomed to thinking of functional programming as a somewhat idealistic, neckbeard-ey thing, but this makes me realize I’ve gradually been converging on a functional approach (striving to be explicit, minimizing side effects, avoiding global state, etc.) in my own work without realizing it.

"But some of the tougher years at NeXT and Pixar had taught him how to stretch a company’s finances,..."

Tue, 01 May 2012 20:09:57 -0700

“But some of the tougher years at NeXT and Pixar had taught him how to stretch a company’s finances, which helped him ride out his first couple of years back, when Apple was still reliant on a weak jumble of offerings. With newfound discipline, he quickly streamlined the company’s product lines. And just as he had at Pixar, he aligned the company behind those projects. In a way that had never been done before at a technology company—but that looked a lot like an animation studio bent on delivering one great movie a year—Jobs created the organizational strength to deliver one hit after another, each an extension of Apple’s position as the consumer’s digital hub, each as strong as its predecessor. If there’s anything that parallels Apple’s decade-long string of hits—iMac, PowerBook, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, to list just the blockbusters—it’s Pixar’s string of winners, including Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, WALL-E, and Up. These insanely great products could have come only from insanely great companies, and that’s what Jobs had learned to build.”

- Into The Wild: Lost Conversations From Steve Jobs’ Best Years | Fast Company (via Christopher Bowns)

jayrobinson: From Ken Segall’s new book, Insanely Simple: The...

Tue, 01 May 2012 16:22:05 -0700

jayrobinson:

From Ken Segall’s new book, Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success:

Steve’s idea was to do a Willy Wonka with it. Just as Wonka did in the movie, Steve wanted to put a golden certificate representing the millionth iMac inside the box of one iMac, and publicize that fact. Whoever opened the lucky iMac box would be refunded the purchase price and be flown to Cupertino, where he or she (and, presumably, the accompanying family) would be taken on a tour of the Apple campus.

Steve had already instructed his internal creative group to design a prototype golden certificate, which he shared with us. But the killer was that Steve wanted to go all out on this. He wanted to meet the lucky winner in full Willy Wonka garb. Yes, complete with top hat and tails.

God, I wish this had actually happened.

"…[GMail’s] old interface had colored borders and variations in background color which..."

Tue, 01 May 2012 11:11:00 -0700

“

…[GMail’s] old interface had colored borders and variations in background color which served to deliniate navigation from content and provide visual landmarks that helped me find my way around the page. It had visual ‘texture’. The new interface lacks that visual texture. Without borders or landmarks, everything blends together into a featureless sea of white and light grey. It requires more work for me to parse visually, to figure out what I’m looking at or to find the link I want to click.

This is what happens when the cult of “minimalism” goes too far.

”

- GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism « Not The User’s Fault

This nicely sums up what bothers me about the school of UI design that glorifies visual minimalism and denigrates even light skeuomorphism as kitsch (Google’s Honeycomb tablet UI is another great example). While I agree Apple has been pushing the bounds of good taste with a lot of their recent work (iCal, Find My Friends, iPhoto for iOS), people who dismiss anything but flat, utilitarian UI as fluff are missing the important usability cues that texture, shadow and visual hierarchy can provide.

"In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate..."

Tue, 01 May 2012 10:32:10 -0700

“In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded. Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family you’re likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family you’re likely to go to business school.”

- George Monbiot – The Self-Attribution Fallacy

Stanley Kubrick photographing show girl Rosemary Williams (via...

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:27:00 -0700

Stanley Kubrick photographing show girl Rosemary Williams (via Mills Baker)

The Museum of the City of New York has a pretty amazing collection of Stanley Kubrick’s photos of New York City.

How to write an iOS app purely in C - Stack Overflow

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:03:00 -0700

How to write an iOS app purely in C - Stack Overflow:

(via Klaas Pieter Annema)

I’m not big on super wonky interview questions, but when I interviewed engineering candidates at Apple, one of the advanced questions I occasionally liked to trot out was about ways to use object oriented techniques in a non-object oriented language like C (if you’re wondering what I was getting at with this, take a look at the OO-like conventions employed by Apple’s straight C Core Foundation frameworks).

I always liked this question because if someone did well on it, they demonstrated three things:

A good grasp of C.
A deep understanding of object oriented programming.
An appreciation for the fact that (as I said on Twitter today) there is no “magic” in programming—that everything is basically an abstraction built on top of lower level abstractions.

"In the case of gender-reveal parties, couples take a private moment made possible by science and..."

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 10:48:00 -0700

“

In the case of gender-reveal parties, couples take a private moment made possible by science and oblige others to join in, with the result—as in so many invented rituals of our day—that the focus turns from where it ought to be (in this case, the baby) to the self. At a bris or christening, the emotional emphasis falls on the arrival of a new life in the embrace of family and community. At a gender-reveal party, the camera is on the expectant father tearing up at the sight of pink cake.

That’s the nature of manufactured customs and instant traditions. They emerge from an atomized society in order to fill a perceived void where real ceremonies used to be, and they end by reflecting that society’s narcissism. Is it too much to say that gender-reveal parties are a mild symptom of cultural despair?

”

- Gender-Reveal Parties and Cultural Despair : The New Yorker (via Rachel Syme)

Things like this increasingly feel to me like plot points in my generation’s version of “Mad Men,” 50 years from now.