Category: observations

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Consuming vs Producing

Two recent events have brought me to the apex of this thought.

First, those of you who have been curiously clicking through my “New blog post:…” tweets would have noticed that I’ve made a real big effort string together at very least a post a day (You’re reading my eleventh consecutive post, thank you for asking). Blogging daily has been my little way of intentionally producing something with latent time that I have, as opposed to mindlessly consuming.

Second, my dear wife (upon my request) bought me a Kindle DX for my impending birthday. If you’re not already aware, the Kindle is representational of a whole new class of, what I’d like to coin, hyper-consumption computing (HCC) devices. In my own opinionated, un-peer reviewed definition, these devices are design with only to serve a single purpose – making the consumption of information as frictionless and pleasurable as possible.

Why it is in every device makers’ interests to excel at such a goal is a topic for another day, but the bottom-line is, such devices, if not engaged with active intention, can very easily and quickly dull the producer in each of us.

Yes, it dulls the producer in you.

Allow me to expand on the concept of producing something. Going out on a photo shoot is producing, browsing through endless Flickr streams is consuming. Baking a cake is producing. Reading food blogs is consuming. Going out on a bike ride is producing, watching Le Tour on television is consuming. Learning a new chord progression is producing, watching YouTube videos of Super Mario covers is consuming. Pulling out a few tools and tightening up your creaky chair is producing, wandering around Ikea is consuming. Assembling Ikea furniture is gray, but you get the idea.

I think sharpening and polishing that producer edge is really important for the following reasons.

1. Producing completes a learning process. One reaps the full benefits of learning when one is forced to reproduce that body of knowledge. For example, when I had to write up a half-semester syllabus for the Interactive Media subject for the Bachelor of Multimedia program at RMIT, it was the hardest thing, but it was also the best educational experience I ever had on the subject.

2. Production is a sign of life (in the broadest, most generalised sense of the word). Live trees produce fruit; wooden shelves don’t. Polar bears produce young; not so, fur rugs. Players on the court tear muscles, grow stronger, nimbler, livelier; spectators, not so much, Et cetera.

3. The act of producing brings with itself the very therapeutic effect of a flow. Where stuffy corners of one’s life is pushed out, the vacuum inevitably draws freshness in – basic laws of thermodynamics. Or for the more poetic, Jordan River vs Dead Sea.

So the next time, right before you engage in an activity, make a mental note:

producing or consuming?

Hopefully, you’ll be all the richer for it, and the people around you should be so lucky to share in goodness of your produce.

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Try something old

Here’s a weekend idea for the our ADD generation.

Don’t learn a new programming language, or another framework, or try another to-do list tutorial. Don’t try a new dinner place or a new recipe. Don’t start on another new idea. Don’t buy a new domain name. Don’t redesign your blog. Don’t sign up for a new social networking account. For goodness sake, don’t update your online profile.

Instead, try something old. Give it another go. Dust off that old startup idea. Do something a second time. Write part two of your blog series. Refine that recipe. Finish that book. Have coffee at that old café you stopped patronizing after you broke up two years ago. Trying adopting that noble habit again.

Because good things take time, and ‘new’ is an overrated knee-jerk reaction for our generation.

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Data wants to be free

So I caught up with a friend who is thinking of launching a startup. The premise of the business is straightforward enough – harvest and sanitize free, publicly available data, and sell to willing buyers with deep pockets.

The conversation came around to how we could do some validated learning a la Lean Startup. I suggested we could package a subset of the data that he’d gathered and try and peddle it to parties that we think would derive value from such a product.

He had a concern – “What I don’t like about that idea is that I lose control of the data. what’s stopping someone from paying a one time fee for the data and just copying it around?”.

“Nothing really. Here’s the fact of the matter – data wants to be free, and she will find any means possible to free herself”.

Building a business around locking down a repository of raw data and selling it is no longer a viable model. The sooner a your model can make peace with that reality, the better its chances of sustaining for the long term.

What emerged out of that was a completely new trajectory and a lively conversation about how we could start thinking about embellishing the data with real and current value.

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Why I’m learning Emacs

In my high school years, I was one of those kids who spent every spare moment geeking out at the school computer lab. The teacher in charge there had a background in software development and was a bit of a nerd himself (thankfully).

Once in a while, a new copy of Microsoft Internet Developer (MIND) magazine would appear in the lab (he’d purchased it). I would eagerly flip through it and attempt to digest its contents.

If you’ve ever have had the privilege of reading one of these magazines, you’ll recall that every feature article had a little callout box at the start that said something to the effect of:

To get the most out of this article, you’ll need to understand Microsoft IIS, MSMQ and ASP

These articles were very technical, and my teenage grey-matter struggled to grasp the concepts presented. Which is why the callout box proved invaluable to me because at very least I knew what those labels were, which meant my journey didn’t need to come to an abrupt end; rather, there were detours that I could take en route to enlightenment.

So I would put down the magazine, seek out some 4-inch thick QUE tome, and wander merrily down wherever the path led for as long as my teenage attention span could last.

Needless to say, I usually didn’t last long enough for the chapter numbers to turn double digits, much less get back to the magazine article that I so wanted to decipher. A month would go by, a new magazine would appear, along with new set of keys for me to acquire in order to unlock the wisdom of the “grown-up professionals”.

How little things have changed.

Just this week, I stumbled upon Steve Yegge’s Tour de Babel. Lo’ and behold, a new carrot was presented to me:

All of the greatest engineers in the world use Emacs. The world-changer types. […] the greatest software developers of our profession, the ones who changed the face of the industry.

And that is why, sucker that I am, and despite having spent the last 5-6 years barely getting comfortable in Vim, I am learning Emacs.

My head hurts like hell because of my vim inclinations, but here’s hoping over a decade in, I would get a little further than my teenage self.

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