Archives for August 2014

As I have taken a look at the balance in my own life, I have started to see the lack of balance in some of the systems that I live within.

Back in the day I was on a quest to know everything I could about technology. At different times the technology differed, but the personification of the obsession was in my era of Ajaxian-in-Chief.

I was on top of every point release from jQuery, Prototype, Dojo, GWT, you name it. Did this help me build great software? While it was good to have some knowledge of the landscape, and it allowed me the freedom to go deep on the browser platform, I can safely say that I was too deep.

Over time I have tried to live in more levels of abstraction. I still want to deeply understand technology, but I also want to understand what users are going through and what products could help them. I even want to understand domains and what is important to the business (but more the user to be honest 😉

Startup Intensity

I felt that I got diminishing returns on my investment, and lost the benefits from thinking about broader impact and possibilities. I shake my head when I think of decisions where I rewrote a system moving from A to B and not delivering value to the user. Sometimes you need to rewrite, but too often I found myself in class second system syndrome.

This leads me to the main topic of this note. There is a feeling that really hurts us with startups and in Silicon Valley.

That feeling is that:

“For your startup to succeed you need to focus 100% of your time on it, you need to eschew other concerns, and you should code all night!”

The personification of this, in a show such as Silicon Valley, is that of the bleary eyed engineer with Mountain Dew cans thrown across his desk.

What goes unsaid here is that if you aren’t doing this, you are lesser for it. Your startup won’t succeed, or you won’t be able to compete with other engineers.

We are learning that we need sleep. We can’t be creative 20 hours a day without it. We also need exercise. We need diversity. We need to feed our bodies good nutrition to optimize our health.

If we don’t give ourselves the opportunity to be at our peak for the longest time possible, we will make poor decisions. One poor decision could be the make or break of a startup. Lots of smaller poor decisions could also mean that the opportunity isn’t met.

It is time to take back this myth and realize the false idols.

The Healthy Hackathon

I was joking with Brad Neuberg about the notion of a “healthy hackathon”. The epitome of the 24/7 hacker culture is the hackathon. A marathon of hacking!

What if we tried something new? What if instead of a weekend of sleeping at your computer screen rushing a project to life for a competition, we gave ourselves the time to try something different.

We come together and experience the balance. Imagine a couple of days where you awaken after a nice sleep and have choices such as:

• guided meditation
• outdoor walks in nature
• hammocks
• yoga
• various exercise options (HIIT, running, etc)
• play (sports, games)
• great healthy food (including learning how to cook it)

It is all interweaved into the day of making software product.

How would that feel? Would we feel like we are “wasting time”? Would we connect more? What would we talk about while hiking around? How would our ideas surface?

There is nothing wrong with the hackathon. A period of intense focus now and then can work, and your body and mind can probably deal with it with enough downtime before or after. In fact, getting into a routine of mini-sprints with appropriate recovery could be ideal!

I also know the importance of timing. You could get lucky and build something at a hackathon right after a new product launches.

However in general I am looking to optimize my performance over the long run. And to do that I need balance. I am not looking to sprint to retirement, I want to be creating and expanding my knowledge and output for as long as I have got. I guess I want to be the turtle… and a happy turtle at that.

Is the West coast getting to me? It this too “hippy”? Is it worth a try?

NOTE: This certainly isn’t tied to just startups or silicon valley. Much of corporate america and the world suffers. I also know that this wouldn’t be new. I have been to various FooCamp type experiences, and I see them growing against the standard “conference”. And look, Khan Academy has already been doing this for years!

Have we, as a species, domesticated ourselves? Does it make sense to reclaim parts of our wild side?

I have been feeling uncomfortable. As I continue the journey from my blissful ignorance to a misty partial understanding of some things I am feeling like a chap in The Matrix who has an inkling that the world isn’t quite as they may have thought it to be.

Of course, in this case, it isn’t that I believe that I am really in a dream state helping to power the robot overlords. However, I do wonder if I am part of a human farm of another context.

I used to be so smug. 2014. Science. Technology. Aren’t we all that. The bees knees you could say. Sure we had massive issues in the world and global warming could be the latest thing to destroy us, but we have such smart people! We always survive.

Even when aliens rain down on us, humans (normally) prevail. Even if we are out matched…. we have spirit! Ingenuity! Kirk will make it happen.

Of course nature doesn’t care. More species are extinct than we can see today. It isn’t even close (~50MN species out of ~1-4BN). And if you go into the world of bacteria? Yowsers.

There are people, ideas, and creations that I think are very special to me. This doesn’t mean that the universe thinks that humans are special.

While we as humans may not be as evolving at an increased speed, the fact that we are a great swiss army knife of a species means that we have been able to build tools to leverage the environment. Through medicine and surgery and agriculture massive changes have come about in a minuscule evolutionary window. It is truly hard to fathom the scale. So much has changed for us in a sliver of time.

The era of agriculture

I wonder how we will look back at agriculture and the side effects. Until recently I may have only thought it a good thing. We got to build a scale of food production that could (maybe?) feed the world. It enabled us to settle and spend more of our time on non “finding food to survive” activities. So much good came of all of this.

However, did it also not start the process of domestication. While we enjoy being proud domesticators of beasts and plants a like, is it maybe us that have been domesticated too? We often joke that:

“Are we at the top of the food chain or was it the corn that won!”

You could replace “corn” in that line for various other items (various bacteria for example!)

The industrial food machine is awful, we know that. Food in general is changing and we are all seeing the effects. It isn’t that we sacrifice everything else and we prosper. In fact, we have a huge increase in obesity, mental illness, and degenerative diseases. We are a complex system, and so is the planet. Our doctors are not given all of the tools to heal and instead are only able to be reactive, with the ability to solve an emergency situation, but we aren’t setup to fix the problem before it even came about.

Oh, it’s worth it. We are fat and happy! We can hang out and watch TV vs. run after our food. Turn that around on the animals though. We have found that captivity doesn’t do wonders for our animals and we are creating our own captivity. When you compare a wild cow on the pasture vs. one stuck in the complex, what do you think? Do you think “lucky guy… he gets to be out of the rain!”

We have created our own limits, but I wonder if this can all end up OK. Many poor side effects came about due to the globalization of the agriculture-d conquerors. Fast forward to today and we have some tools that are truly magic. If we can find the balance between finding our wild ways, and keeping pushing with knowledge, then we can find a good path. If we can do it swiftly, maybe we can find a path that gets us onto other planets one day.

As an engineer I always despise a single point of failure. It could be one teacher in a classroom, or one planet for us to live on. We need to scale out, for the sake of our species (we can argue if that matters 😉

If we pull it all off, maybe then all of this waste and some of the mistaken ways may have been the path taken that gets us to evolve to the next point.

We can build systems and solutions that enable us the time to create and push our species forward. We can balance science and technology to provide, without us going to extremes and ending with destruction.

Man, that would be wild.