These are questions for wise men with skinny arms

Lighting strikes twice but you can’t choose to repeat history I started reading Chris Dixon’s book and had a strong immediate reaction. I’m thoroughly unconvicted by its arguments even though I agree with the premise. The very concept of web3 delivering on the early promises of web2 is based on finding and improving on what made the early Internet powerful. Cargo cult technology and business choices might find something by accident, but the current Internet is in every way more powerful than the Internet of the past.

I read the book cover to cover in 2 days. While I found it interesting, it wasn’t a good story with a strong narrative. It was clearly a stitched-together collection of his research notes that didn’t make sense as a column. It suffered from a lack of detail around everything except the engineering, which was disappointing because it could have been a much stronger customer relationship and business management story if written from a slightly different perspective.

I really wanted to like this book, but I didn’t. It succeeds in theory and fails in practice due to the overwhelming evidence organized against it. It viciously and repeatedly attacks the same issues to the point of exhaustion and provides levels of details that are not only unnecessary but sometimes misleading. The worst part is that the first 252 pages of ranting aren’t wrong, but they are so unnecessary as to explain the cause and symptoms of the system.

I was expecting this to be a dissection of the American Healthcare industrial-complex, but instead, this was the story of the ACA (Obamacare) with just enough industry explanation to understand the new regulations. The interesting part was then how the sausage got made and the politics that continue to shape health care policy, and by proxy the hospital and insurance market. Because I learned so much background that was easily digestible in narrative form, I’d give this a B.

I finished this book and thought it was a great set of arguments that address a very toxic, now well publicized, aspect of Silicon Valley, and by connection young software and startup companies today. I didn’t have a good review of it other than to agree with it and to outline my own related experiences in this industry. What’s pushing me now to write this review is another negative review that takes the whole book out of context to try to justify the prevailing culture.

I took this out of Mert’s collection on his recommendation, and while I liked the thoroughness, it over complicates a simple message with business metaphors. I’d simplify that message to Get passionate people to ruthlessly iterate on your problem. Once that was outlined, the rest of the book was repetitive with increasingly convoluted examples. As a business book, this puts it only a little above the average, so I’d give it a C+.

I wrote this in 2015, but I’m publishing it now. It goes well with my theme of technlogical risk and business rewards. A unicorn company has embraced a technology that I’ve also been following for some time and now I’m becoming concerned with the technology’s perception if this company is to fail for reasons other than their technology choices. I’m hesitant to name the company and technology to jinx it, but it doesn’t change the general effect as I’m sure this applies to other emerging technologies that have their fates locked with an unrelated business.

Working to avoid wasting time can be worse than just wasting it. The pursuit of efficiency in high-scale projects pays immediate dividends, but the exploration lost in the process could negate any of the intended gains. Messy innovation often starts as ‘wasted’ time, but’s hard to know what’s really wasted without a larger context of the problem space. The ability to tolerate failures and take risks can be well worth the loss of some implementation efforts.

Looking at projects I’ve done, it’s easy to attach a story to each one. A learning experience in a technology, a leadership role, a support position, a miscommunication, an unmet expectation. It’s easy to look back and pull something valuable out of anything that I can remember. But what about all those experiences of which I have little memory of? Were those wasted like hours of sleep I couldn’t appreciate or did it just build into a story I haven’t yet told, or a story I don’t know how to tell.

After doing mostly backend work for a number of years, I jumped back into the mayhem that is front-end web development. I had kept a careful eye on it while I was away, but never dove deeper than reading the blog posts. It’s both less bad than some would have you believe and far worse than I remembered. The problem I had was that I had forgotten so much of the arcanery.