jonathan poma

I’m genuinely sad to know that Facebook now owns Instagram much in the same way I was sad to learn that Coca Cola owns Odwalla juices, Tom’s of Maine is owned by Colgate-Palmolive and the Clorox Company purchased Burt’s Bees. At the end of the day, to be sad is to be delusional. While I may care about these brands, they don’t know who I am. This is strictly business.

totally agree

If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking, and loving, you don’t actually live longer; it just seems longer.

yup. i'll go with that. interestingly enough, this post is a very good read...but then again, what on the simple.com blog isn't.

If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking, and loving, you don’t actually live longer; it just seems longer.

yup. i'll go with that. interestingly enough, this post is a very good read...but then again, what on the simple.com blog isn't.

If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking, and loving, you don’t actually live longer; it just seems longer.

yup. i'll go with that. interestingly enough, this post is a very good read...but then again, what on the simple.com blog isn't.

Many are rejecting client work to embrace building web apps. This is not because they have a desperate need to build web applications, but rather as a way to avoid client work.

 

I take issue when web designers imply that client work is inferior to application development.

 

In itself I have no problem with this. If a web designer feels unable to have a good working relationship with clients and wants instead to work on web applications that is their decision. However, I do take issue when they imply that client work is in some way inferior.

I also take exception to web designers who treat their clients as a cash cow to fund their application development.

I love working with clients. I find nothing more rewarding than being dropped into a new organisation, in a new sector and wrapping my head around their unique problems before finding an elegant web solution.

I love working with clients in a collaborative relationship to produce something truly amazing and unique. I love solving real world business problems in a way that meets the needs of both the client and the target audience.

i agree very much with this sentiment.

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk in the tech world and beyond about getting more people to learn computer programming. I think this is a worthy goal*, but the question should be considered from various angles.

1. Jobs & the economy. Businesses all over the world need more programmers. Every company I know is hiring engineers (e.g. see this list of NY tech startups). Top programmers can make $100K right out of college. Yet there were only about 14,000 computer science (CS) majors last year. Meanwhile about 40,000 people got law degrees even though demand for lawyers has been shrinking. America is suffering from what economists call structural unemployment:  jobs are available but our labor force isn’t trained for those jobs.

2. Programming is a great foundation for a tech/startup career. CS is a great foundation to do other things in tech industry like starting a tech company (although I’d argue that design is an increasingly valuable foundation for web startups). I suspect one of the reasons for the low number of CS majors is people don’t realize all the non-programming opportunities that are opened up by a background in programming.

3. Programming is an important part of being “culturally literate.” Algorithmic thinking is as fundamental a type of thinking as mathematical thinking. For example, Daniel Dennett convincingly argues that the best way to understand Darwin’s theory of evolution is by thinking of it as an algorithm. (I haven’t read it yet but I’m told the premise of Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science is that algorithmic methods should be applied much more broadly across the sciences). Teaching algorithmic thinking – which is what CS does – should be a core part of a liberal arts education.

4. Programming is a great activity.  Most people who program describe themselves as entering a mental flow state where they are intensely immersed and time seems to fly by. It feels similar to reading a great book. You also feel great afterwards – it is the mental equivalent of going to the gym.

5. Should non-technical people at tech startups learn to code? This is where I disagree with some of the conventional wisdom. Certainly it is worthwhile learning programming, at least for reasons 3 & 4 above. You should realize, however, that to become a good programmer takes thousands of hours of practice. I’d also argue that if you are a non-technical person working at a web company the the first thing you should learn is internet architecture (DNS, http, html, web servers, database, TCP/UDP, IP, etc). Learning some programming is good too, to help relate to technical colleagues. But if your goal is to build a large-scale web service, your time as a non-technical person is better spent recruiting people who have been coding for years.

* Disclosure: I’m an investor via Founder Collective in two companies related to teaching programming:  Codecademy and Hacker School.

all great and valid points. great post once again by @cdixon

How do agile methodologies apply to publishing?

Kristen McLean: In relation to publishing, we're really talking about two things: agile content development and agile workflow.

Agile content development is the idea that we may be able to apply these methodologies to creating content in a very different way than we are traditionally used to. This could mean anything from serialized book content to frequent releases of digital content, like book-related websites, apps, games and more. The discussion of how agile might be applied to traditional book content is just beginning, and I think there's an open-ended question about how it might intersect with the deeply personal — and not always quick — process of writing a book.

I don't believe some of our greatest works could have been written in an agile framework (think Hemingway, Roth, or Franzen), but I also believe agile might lend itself to certain kinds of book content, like serial fiction (romance, YA, mystery) and some kinds of non-fiction. The real question has to do with what exactly a "book" is and understanding the leading edge between knowing your audience and crowdsourcing your material.

Publishing houses have been inherently hierarchical because they've been organized around a manufacturing process wherein a book's creation has been treated as though it's on an assembly line. The publisher and editor have typically been the arbiters of content, and as a whole, publishers have not really cultivated a direct relationship with end users. Publishers make. Users buy/read/share, etc.

Publishers need to adapt to a radically different way of working. For example, here's a few ways agile strategies could help with the adaptation of a publishing workflow:

• Create flat, flexible teams of four to five super-talented individuals with a collective skill set — including editorial, marketing, publicity, production, digital/design, and business — all working together from the moment of acquisition (or maybe before). These teams would need to be completely fluent in XHTML and would work under the supervision of a managing publisher whose job would be to create the proper environment and remove impediments so the team could do its job.
• An original creative voice and unique point of view will always be important in great writing, but those of us who produce books as trade objects (and package the content in them) have to stop assuming we know what the market wants and start talking to the market as frequently as possible.
• Use forward-facing data and feedback to project future sales. Stop using past sales as the exclusive way to project future sales. The market is moving too fast for that, and we all know there is a diminishing return for the same old, same old.

It’s difficult to take an “anti-faith” position. There’s no pejorative connotation of the word faithful. The only time “faith” seems negative is when it’s prefaced by the word “blind.” But blind faith is the only kind of faith there is. In order for someone’s faith to be meaningful, it has to be blind. Anyone can believe a hard fact that everyone already accepts. That’s easy. If you can see something, you don’t need faith. Faith in the seeable is meaningless. But meaningful faith is dangerous. It simplifies things that aren’t simple. Throughout the 20th century, there were only two presidents who won reelection with a bad economy and high unemployment: FDR in 1936 and Reagan in 1984. In both cases, the incumbent presidents were able to argue that their preexisting plans for jump-starting the economy were better than the hypothetical plans of their opponents (Alf Landon and Walter Mondale, respectively). Both incumbents made a better case for what they intended to do, and both enjoyed decisive victories. In 2012, Barack Obama will face a similar situation. But what will happen if his ultimate opponent provides no plan for him to refute? What if his opponent merely says, “Have faith in me. Have faith that I will figure everything out and that I can fix the economy, because I have faith in the American people. Together, we have faith in each other.”

A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product.

Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don't get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call. One of the team members marched in and told me about it when they launched, and I asked: "So is it the Stalker API?" She got all glum and said "Yeah." I mean, I was joking, but no... the only API call we offer is to get someone's stream. So I guess the joke was on me.

Microsoft has known about the Dogfood rule for at least twenty years. It's been part of their culture for a whole generation now. You don't eat People Food and give your developers Dog Food. Doing that is simply robbing your long-term platform value for short-term successes. Platforms are all about long-term thinking.

Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that's not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there's something there for everyone.

Our Google+ team took a look at the aftermarket and said: "Gosh, it looks like we need some games. Let's go contract someone to, um, write some games for us." Do you begin to see how incredibly wrong that thinking is now? The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them.

You can't do that. Not really. Not reliably. There have been precious few people in the world, over the entire history of computing, who have been able to do it reliably. Steve Jobs was one of them. We don't have a Steve Jobs here. I'm sorry, but we don't.