My first post to Hashnode after signing up here and on Dev.to (still need to start here), with an already-existing (and paid) Medium account. What does the world need but more publishing platforms? Well let us begin by completely avoiding the various problems with the show, the character, and the actors in that cover picture. Instead, my first post is about collaboration.

Early Days

I myself was a bit of an oddball through high school, usually waking up early to do my homework over breakfast, catching a city bus to get to campus out of district, heading to McDonald’s for a pittance (but noteworthy experiences, for another time) and then home to sleep for what seemed like a few minutes.

I did not do homework with my colleagues, so the academic side was essentially solo. I did, of course, learn how to play well with others for the extra-curricular activities and at work, and so when I went off to college I had some idea how to collab, which would most definitely come in handy.

Harvey Mudd you SOB

When I entered Mudd, our year was the first where only one semester would be graded Pass/Fail, where years prior were awarded a full year to get used to the insanity. While the first semester was arguably most of two years or so of high school packed in nice and tight, it turns out that I did not know as much chemistry as I thought I did, very nearly not-passing that first semester. A bit of a wake-up call, to be sure.

In the second semester, after the great room swap in West Dorm (I want to say there were around a dozen frosh involved, almost all of us of the 88 people in the entire building, including one pair who agreed to move one room over just to make everybody happy. Kudos to them, definitely), my new roommates and I settled into substantial collaborative habits, and that extended well beyond our room as all of us learned how to work together, to seek help, to ask upper classpeople about whatever they might remember, and so on. Anyone who had been anti-social before getting to Mudd (there were plenty, this being a ridiculous nerd school and all) was either a genius, or didn't get to hang around much after the first year. That place was not so easy, and would almost certainly have been much less fun alone (while it lasted).

One of the many take-home lessons, then, was that working with our colleagues was a good idea, and learning how to cooperate and collaborate rather than competing (not that there were no competitive types who maybe strayed from this ideal), whether it was in a pure science field like chemistry or physics where peer review and experiment reproduction are essential (if not always perfect) or my major, Engineering, where intra-team and inter-team effort have multi-billion-dollar (or whatever your favorite currency is) impact, not to mention managing all of that (more big numbers) both in development and in production (and elsewhere), we all learned or learned more how teamwork can and most often does work.

For me, teams of 3-6 people, typically right around 4, were ideal. Maybe this isn't true for everyone, but 2 is tricky, 3 is close, 5-6 is maybe too many unless the project is more complex. In my experience, the right number is 4. If we leave off Erlich Bachman, Pied Piper was right there. This was always something I took notice of while watching an otherwise-ridiculous, over-the-top look at some version of what it was like to be in Silicon Valley once upon a time (more on that in another post).

Fast Forward to right about… Now

I have about a dozen projects in some state of disarray at the moment. They are all my own creation, they are all viable (from where I sit), they are all actual projects with monetization, appeal, utility, and if the sun shines just right one of these days, sustainable success. The problem, if there is only one, is that this has been the case for multiple years. I mean multiple, as in, more than 3. More than 5 for some, as many as 8 for a couple.

WTF?

I've often said (based on that Silicon Valley section, a wacky collection of jobs and people and times from which I learned so much) that the Engineering/Marketing/Sales triumvirate is essential to produce enough tension to launch products when they are Good Enough. This is not perfect. Anyone who has ever had to support someone selling The Demo as The Product, suffered Marketecture specs in a slide deck, heard someone in Sales suggest that they already sold what was in the magazine (remember those?) article so we better be able to ship it, or heard anyone outside of The Devs say this:

Since we need to slip the schedule anyway, do we have enough time now to add more features?

You haven't truly experience the life of product development folk (whether you find yourself in Engineering or in Product Development or a Tech Group or whatever) until you have faced these apparent escapes from reality, but then you might also have been lucky enough to avoid the challenges our Marketing and Sales people face out there in the world while we sit in our cubes (or at home, lately, or in a coffee shop or similar, or wherever) and write on white boards and commit our various changes while trying not to break the build (clearly this is a software-centric take, I actually worked more in the firmware and embedded space for a good long time, so add gerbers and back-annotations to schematics and board bring-up and whatnot). That inter-group tension, the intra-team camaraderie, the sense of accomplishment when more features work and the nagging and whining give way to adulation and shipping parties might for some make it all worthwhile.

If you have had all of those experiences and yet you still want to be an entrepreneur, we are sipping from the same absinthe fountain. Who among us has not had the sense that the idea that has been stirring around in the back of our minds might not be the next big thing, or might at least make for a nice little lifestyle business that will fuel our adventures, including maybe other startups and lifestyle businesses? Blue skies are powerful distractions.

So many times over the years, I have said exactly this:

I need a [Gilfoyle|Dinesh]

In fact, I would usually do better when I say that, to ask for both. While the show was first run I had been traveling quite a bit working for Intel (yet more posts to come) many people in Las Vegas (my home base) were trying to get their own startups off the ground within the train wreck known as The Downtown Project and some treated the HBO series as some sort of a guide. I hope they were not serious, but some probably were. I was usually able to catch the odd episode while in a hotel somewhere in the world, and I always came away with the same impressions:

• Clearly Mike Judge was encapsulating every wacko thing that ever happened, real or imagined, in silly valley and had all of it happen to this one little startup.
• I wish I had a team who would put up with all of that chaos and stick around until the end.

What about Jared? Yes, he was essential, in vary weird ways, and while for my own projects, G and D are key to get to the essential milestones, having a Jared on the team would be a net positive, there is no doubt about that. Bachman, not so much.

What Of Tomorrow, Then

Thanks to the weirdness of the Las Vegas rental and real estate markets (wherever they meet), I was not offered an opportunity to renew my lease after eight years (I was probably due to leave before that), and the place I locked up 28 hours later was not to be available until October 19, leaving me with a 7 week gap of homelessness. What better to do than visit my parents, bringing my standing desk and computer along with me? Have computer will work on all of my projects at the same time, after all.

Between beginning the first of this gaggle of projects (which was, arguably, my first Android application I wrote on my Android One or whatever that thing was called, which I think I found when I was packing) and right now as I type this, some or all of these have slowed me down:

• Troubled girlfriend (later troubled ex-girlfriend)
• Managerial intrigue (that's probably another post on its own)
• A house (not mine) slipping off its foundation
• The Global Financial Crisis of 2008
• Layoffs and Downturns
• World Travel
• Fire
• Violence
• Three relocations
• More layoffs
• This relocation gap
• Probably others

World travel isn't so bad, but in the scheme of things, it halts forward progress just like a fire does (though less soot on all of my surviving possessions). Without collaborators, it is easy enough to measure progress, because if I find myself doing something that is not directly advancing the cause (indirectly advancing the cause is a ruse and does not count), there is zero work being done, and thus, all is halted. This becomes all of the negative things, like Frustrating, Depressing, De-motivating, etc. Even worse, the more time clocked on the negative side, the less effective the time spent doing real work actually is.

The question I ask now, even as I also look around for side gigs, contracts, maybe even a full time job (I found a really interesting req on Indeed.com and as I type this am looking forward to a 30-minute intro call, which could go either way, but the job looks really interesting), is the job market churning up the latent entrepreneurs out there, looking for projects to join? Is there a pool of Gilfoyle and Dinesh analogs forming at a pinball museum near me? Maybe. I have not had the best luck trolling for co-founders and junior developers around my neck of the woods over recent years (especially right around 2020, strangely enough), but who can say.

Consider this first post merely the first part of this story, with the subsequent editions containing more interesting news. Maybe. Hopefully. Essentially. Watch this space.

I will close with a link to Gilfoyle’s Cryptocurrency Slide Deck

Thanks for stopping by!