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Interesting, short interview with Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. Mostly about innovation, and how Amazon prospers because of their focus on improving the customer experience. Innovation makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

One thing I like about building software is that failure is normal. You have to try so many different approaches, and so many of them don't work. Some approaches fail at the idea stage; a few fail after you've spent days or weeks seemingly close to making them work. Each failure is painful.

If you were building a bridge or a putting out a fire, failure would be a total loss: materials wasted, property destroyed. But in making software, failure is actually a form of progress. When you're exploring the boundaries of what's possible, you're often going to set your sights beyond those boundaries. In making software, you're constantly reminded of this. As a result, you either get disparaged and start doing less risky, less creative work—or you learn to treat failure as an experimental result that confirms the value of the endeavor.

People who really care about making software know this. It's spread throughout the culture: good programmers, managers, execs, and even venture capitalists know the value of failure. For all the shortcomings of techie culture, it is this courage that redeems us. And because technology is an ever-increasing part of the world economy, the world is on a cultural path toward valuing failure and away from denigrating it. The effects ripple far beyond technology, making now a better time than ever to be creative.

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Another nice article by Paul Graham. This one's about attracting, retaining, and managing Great Hackers.

Because you can't tell a great hacker except by working with him, hackers themselves can't tell how good they are. This is true to a degree in most fields. I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent. The people I've met who do great work rarely think that they're doing great work. They generally feel that they're stupid and lazy, that their brain only works properly one day out of ten, and that it's only a matter of time until they're found out.

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Geet has some interesting ideas for incorporating a refinement process into blog publishing. The refinement process is one thing I'd like to support in frassle, so it's good to get another person's perspective on how it might work.

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When I was an Israeli paratrooper a general stopped by to give us a little speech about strategy. In infantry battles, he told us, there is only one strategy: Fire and Motion. You move towards the enemy while firing your weapon. The firing forces him to keep his head down so he can't fire at you. (That's what the soldiers mean when they shout "cover me." It means, "fire at our enemy so he has to duck and can't fire at me while I run across this street, here." It works.) The motion allows you to conquer territory and get closer to your enemy, where your shots are much more likely to hit their target. If you're not moving, the enemy gets to decide what happens, which is not a good thing. If you're not firing, the enemy will fire at you, pinning you down.

How does this relate to software? If you're supposed to be making a product but keep on being distracted by the barrage of buzzwords, you're pinned down. Keep moving, even a little bit, every day.

Also good by Joel: an article on measurement dysfunction in the workplace.

What I like about software: it's the one creative realm where we aggressively work to understand what makes a multi-person creative process work.

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Friedman has a short and sweet commentary on outsourcing. What it boils down to is this: America has a unique culture and infrastructure designed to facilitate innovation.

America is the greatest engine of innovation that has ever existed, and it can't be duplicated anytime soon, because it is the product of a multitude of factors: extreme freedom of thought, an emphasis on independent thinking, a steady immigration of new minds, a risk-taking culture with no stigma attached to trying and failing, a noncorrupt bureaucracy, and financial markets and a venture capital system that are unrivaled at taking new ideas and turning them into global products.

This resonates encouragingly with some thoughts I wrote a few months ago under the heading A silver lining in the cloud of outsourcing. Though there are some major industry changes that will upset many people— including some I know personally and wish the best for— the end result will be to refine America's focus on innovation. The challenge to address is not just how do we make the short-term economic impact of offshoring less devastating, but how do we transition the labor forces to sustain and develop America's infrastructure for innovation?

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It's not interesting AI unless it convinces someone that human race will meet its doom at the hands of evil sentient machines.

During my freshman year of college, while walking through the path in front of the Williams College Museum of Art, I invented a piece of personal doctrine. The principle I invented was small and easy to understand but with profound implications, just like a good computer program. It was that

I should never do anything I'd be ashamed to have appear in a personal journal on a public website.

Naturally, there are some obvious exceptions. For example, if a friend confides in me and I listen to his secrets, those do not go up on the web journal of my thought-experiment. Details of my sex life are also not the public's business. But the point was to give myself a tool for evaluating certain long-term consequences of my decisions as I decided them.

In particular, this got me into the habit of asking myself how my actions could be scrutinized. I didn't want to please everyone or get everyone to agree with me. What I wanted to do was avoid any situations where I might have to defend something I felt was indefensible.

As a result, I always wanted to find and reconcile small personal conflicts before they became big ones. I got into the habit of reflecting on my actions and trying to understand what motivated them. I'd take a devil's advocate position, pretending I was someone out to prove that Shimon was stupid or evil. Real Shimon and Devil Shimon would argue (politely) in my head. The goal was to be able to either honestly refute or honestly take responsiblity for any shortcoming Devil Shimon could find.

Did this prevent me from making any mistakes? Hardly. But it made me realize that I can make mistakes, even mistakes that hurt people or hurt me, and that it's OK. I can learn from them, and I can be careful and avoid them in the future. But the doctrine of honesty gave me a powerful tool for dealing with my mistakes: it enabled me to consider them scientifically.

If you have not been in a good writing workshop, you may not know the value of confronting your own mistakes scientifically. The reason is that by nature, human beings have a certain level of pride in and expectations for thier work. We are usually not conscious of our pride and expectations until they're injured or unmet, hence the popular truism you don't know what you've got till it's gone.

The problem with having pride and expectations is that you subconsciously support your pride, or your expectations. These concerns become hidden assumptions; the things you can't say. Well, at most crucial junctures in thinking, there is good sense to saying those things you can't say. In science, the major breakthroughs must not, by definition, fit into current paradigms. In therapy, the fears that a patient is unable to talk about are the most crippling.

Unsurprisingly, this scales to one's day-to-day life. Those actions you take that you're least inclined to examine, those motivations you're least inclined to explore for fear of what it might admit, are exactly your greatest opportunities to improve yourself as a human being. Just like those problems in a poem you bring to a workshop that you're most afraid will expose your lack of skill will in fact do that and show you, conspicuously, how to improve both your current poem and your overall ability.

Maybe that's why I blog— to keep myself honest, and to remind myself that I can make mistakes. In writing. Several times a day.

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On connections between art and science, the creative element in software making, and other good stuff.