Hands-on CXX. 30+ year entrepreneur and technologist, blend of consumer and enterprise experience; deep passion for engaging directly with customers and building businesses that solve for multiple bottom-lines (financial, human, social, natural), with a special focus on products, customers, and systemic change; a key role in four exits (Rhithm,
Food on the Table,
Five Runs,
Sapling Learning); work featured in Lean Startup by Eric Ries, Running Lean by Ash Maurya.
Infrastructure
So in the physical world, there’s tremendous constraints placed on a system by existing infrastructure. It defines and limits what can be done without significant extra resources expended - which means cost, complexity, risk, etc.
In a recent issue of Wired, there’s an article about how a new city in China is being designed with what amounts to a well thought out infrastructure optimized towards energy use
It’s an interesting contrast between that approach and the agile software approach of evolving the infrastructure (and the approach to infrastructure that’s true for most cities as well). Of course, the infrastructure in software is much more malleable than the physical infrastructure of a city - yet there are still great costs and challenges with evolving software infrastructure.
Why haven’t we figured out how to make this easier?
Excite Reunion
Thanks to Julie, we had a great Excite.com reunion party last night at her house. Ostensibly, it was to celebrate an old Excite comrade (Kuntay) coming to Austin to work (at least for a little while) - and it was a great reason for many of us to get back together.
I have to say, after many years - it may be corny (but not surprising to those who know me), that I still fell privileged to have worked with such a great group of people who all shared a common purpose. For many of us, the world-changing potential of online community (now known as social media) was not just a j o b - but meant something personal.
I’ve been fortunate to work with some of those folks since then, as well as to help create similarly rewarding groups as well. I hope that continues.
MacFuse - Sweet
Ok - so maybe it’s a sign of just how much a shiny-gadget-geek I am, but I love what’s possible with MacFuse (and MacFusion). For example, I have an existing website (at omnis.com) that doesn’t have a ssh account, so the only way to deploy / work on what’s there is via FTP. So when I need to work on it, I have to use FTP to push & pull code & data, but I don’t do it that often - so I’d have to right FTP client to do bulk transfer was a pain, etc. So now, turn on ftpfs via MacFuse and woila (as my 4 yr old says) - there’s the shooting match. Now, it’s an easy matter to bring it all back down locally, put in SVN (as it should have been years ago) and re-deploy to my new account at dreamhost.
No new functionality, just a greater ease of use - esp. since my muscle memory knows how to use either shell or finder interfaces to work with files.